The takes with mistakes outperform the clean ones.
Creator footage came back last month. She stumbled on a product name, paused to find the right word, checked her notes mid-take. My instinct was to cut all of it. We kept some in.
Glad we did.
The formats that worked in 2021-2023 moved through their lifecycle faster than any advertising trend before them. POV hooks, fake text overlays, green screen stitches. They worked because they looked like organic content instead of ads.
Then everyone ran them. Audiences learned to recognize them. Now they scroll past before the hook lands.
UGC isn't dying (the industry is predicted to hit $12 billion in 2026, ~28% average YoY growth!). But it's more saturated than ever, and standing out is getting harder.
The audience UGC was built to reach, younger consumers who grew up ignoring banner ads and skipping pre-roll, developed their filters by watching thousands of hours of content. They know what a brief sounds like even when the creator is technically "being themselves." The same people who made UGC work in 2021 are now the hardest to reach with lazy versions of it.
Cookie cutter scripts get scrolled. Doesn't matter how good the creator is. If the strategy is hollow, the audience knows. They might not articulate it, but they feel it. And they're gone.
AI-generated UGC accelerates this. We're close to synthetic creators that pass as real on first glance. When that's standard, every visual marker of authenticity the industry built collapses.
The pendulum is swinging back toward rawness across digital media. Lo-fi aesthetics, imperfection, visible humanity. UGC will follow. What remains is stuff that's difficult to manufacture at scale. The pause where someone actually thinks. The small imperfections that prove a human is there.
Time to be bolder. The format is more viable than ever. But if it's recognizable, it's already inefficient. If the script has no point of view, it's already lost.