UGC examples: twelve formats and what each one proves

Six formats that show the product doing its job

Everything on this page is a video format, shot on a phone, one creator, no crew. The six below exist to make a mechanism visible so the viewer stops guessing what the thing does. Brief them when the product is unfamiliar or the value is physical.

• Close-range demoThe creator uses the product within arm's length of the lens: the pump pressed, the lid clicked, the screen tapped. The job is showing the mechanism at a distance where the viewer can see it happen. Brief the single action the purchase depends on.
• Narrow tutorialOne task, start to finish, inside a minute. The job is teaching, so the product earns its place by being the thing that makes the task possible rather than the subject of the lesson.
• Routine insertThe product appears inside a sequence the viewer already runs: the eight minutes before work, the wind-down after a shift. The job is placement. It answers when, not how.
• Unboxing to first usePackage on the table, cut, contents laid out, first attempt filmed without rehearsal. The job is removing setup dread for anything that arrives in parts or needs pairing.
• Dated check-inThe creator films the starting state, says the window out loud, then films the same angle again at the end of it. The job is credibility on a slow result, and the date spoken on camera is what makes it believable.
• Faceless b-roll with voiceoverNo talking head. Hands, product, surfaces, cut under narration recorded separately. The job is covering categories where creators will not show their face, and the clips double as footage your editor can recut.

One batch usually needs two of these rows, not all five.

Six formats that answer a doubt instead

A viewer who understands the product and still does not buy has a specific objection. These six take the objection head on rather than explaining the feature set again.

• Talking-head accountCreator to lens, shoulders up, describing what they used it for and what they noticed. The job is a first-person report. Brief the subject, never the sentences, or it reads as a script being performed.
• Question answered on cameraOpen on the exact question buyers type into your chat widget, answer it in one breath, show the evidence. The job is closing one gap: sizing, cleanup, compatibility, how loud it is.
• Swap clipThe creator shows what they used before, then the replacement, against one stated criterion. The job is framing a trade honestly, so keep it to the creator's own history rather than a competitor's name.
• Screen-recorded reactionThe creator sits beside a screenshot of their own review, a delivery notification, or their order history and talks over it. The job is giving a static artefact a voice.
• Numbered reasonsThree reasons, three cuts, one sentence each, no introduction. The job is density for somebody scrolling fast, and it hands an editor three separate openings from one take.
• Restock clipShot on the day they reorder: the empty tub, the replacement, and the reason they bought it twice. The job is proving repeat purchase, which is the hardest thing to fake and the easiest thing to brief.

What each category in our index actually films

Formats are not spread evenly across categories. The index holds 24,032 UGC-qualified creators and 15 categories carry enough of them to staff a batch. Beauty is the deepest at 4,550 creators, and those profiles are full of application footage and dated check-ins rather than comparisons.

Fitness and parenting profiles lean to routine inserts, because the product already sits inside a session or a bedtime that gets filmed anyway. Home and food skew to close range: the pan, the mop head, the batter mid-pour. Tech and finance carry the highest share of screen-recorded work, and they are the only categories where a faceless voiceover reads as normal rather than evasive. Fashion is try-on and swap. Travel is environment plus narration.

Nearly half of the index, 47.9%, is unlabelled. A niche sticks to a profile only when its own bio text matches one of the families in our taxonomy, and plenty of working creators never describe themselves that way. Shortlisting by format therefore means watching four recent clips with the sound on rather than trusting a label to tell you who can hold a close-up steady.

Which viewer each of the twelve formats is built for

Format choice is a distribution decision. A clip that lands on a cold audience is usually the wrong clip for somebody who has already read your product page twice, because those two people need different things proved.

Why this page describes formats instead of playing them

There are no embedded clips here, and that is deliberate. We do not hold the rights to other people's footage, and reposting a creator's video to illustrate a point is the mistake we spend the rest of the site telling brands not to make. A description you can paste into a brief is more useful anyway. A link to somebody's Reel is a mood-board entry that expires the day they archive it.

What we do hold is the index, and it is assembled only from what creators publish themselves: the open profile, the site linked in the bio, the portfolio they chose to put behind it. Nobody applies to be in it, nobody is added on request, and a place in it is not for sale. Each profile had to show evidence of paid work for brands before it was kept, which is a different test from having an audience; just under 1,600 rows in the most recent refresh did not pass it. The figures on this page come from the 14 September 2026 snapshot.

Nothing in our data records engagement or fees, so we cannot rank these twelve formats by performance and will not imply otherwise. What the data does show is which formats a category's creators have demonstrably shot, which is the part that decides whether your brief gets accepted or ignored.

Turning a format into one line of a brief

A format name on its own is not a brief. Send a demo comes back as a forty-second pan across a shelf. The line a creator can quote against names the format, the must-show moment, the runtime and the number of openings.

1. Name one format and stopUse a single label from the twelve and nothing else in that sentence. Two formats inside one deliverable produces a clip that does neither.
2. Write the must-show momentThe one action, screen or texture that has to appear, and roughly when. This is the sentence most briefs are missing.
3. Set the runtime and the frameA range rather than a number: 15 to 30 seconds, vertical, captions burned in, native audio. Ranges get filled; exact durations get argued about.
4. Say how many openings you wantThree openings on the same body is a cheaper route to variety than three separate clips. The hook generator is for drafting those openings, not for writing the script.
5. Attach the licence to the same paragraphWhich channels it runs on, whether media money is involved, the length of the term, and the territories. Price follows that answer: our own planning estimate for a short vertical clip of half a minute or less begins near $150 in the smallest follower band and climbs from there, which is a figure for planning against rather than a rate.
6. Put a date on deliveryOne delivery date and one revision round, in writing. The campaign brief generator produces this shape if you would rather answer fields than draft from blank.