We run both kinds of project, so we have no side in this fight. What we do have is a steady supply of calls from brands who bought one while expecting the other. The confusion makes sense: both involve a person holding a product and talking to a phone. They’re bought differently, though, they run differently and they fail differently.
A quick word on the name. “User-generated content” once meant things customers made for free. In advertising it now mostly means a paid creator making a video for a brand to run as its own. The name stuck anyway.
The basic difference
With UGC you’re buying a video. With influencer marketing you’re buying access to an audience, and the video comes along with it. Nearly everything else follows from that.
- Where it runs. UGC runs from your ad account, to whoever you target. An influencer post goes to their followers, on their profile.
- What you pay for. UGC is usually a flat fee per video plus usage rights. Influencer fees tend to track audience size and engagement.
- Who controls it. With UGC you get revisions, extra hooks and recuts. An influencer knows their audience better than you do, and will push back if you try to write the post for them.
- What you keep. A UGC video is yours to run for the agreed term. An influencer post lives in their feed unless you pay for more.
- How you measure it. UGC gets judged like any other ad, on cost per purchase. Influencer work is better judged on reach, code use and what happens to sales around the post.
A worked example
Say you sell a $38 dog shampoo and you have $2,000 for content this quarter. These numbers are hypothetical, so swap in your own.
Option one is twenty UGC videos at $100 each. You now have twenty ads to test, and nobody sees a single one until you put media spend behind them.
Option two is one post from a dog-focused creator with a solid following, for the same $2,000. Thousands of dog owners see it on day one with no extra spend. You also get one message, one shot and about a week of attention.
Neither is the better deal in general. If you already run paid social and your ads are going stale, option one gives you months of material. If nobody has heard of you and you have no ad budget, twenty videos in a folder will do very little.
How to choose
UGC tends to fit when
- You already spend on paid social and want more to test.
- You need to learn which message sells.
- You want volume, variations and a predictable cost per video.
Influencers tend to fit when
- You’re launching and need people to have heard of you.
- Your buyers trust specific voices, as they often do in parenting, fitness and skincare.
- You want to reach a community that already exists and doesn’t respond to ads.
Using both
Past the launch stage, the more useful question is usually the order. One sequence works well: test messages cheaply with UGC, then hand the winning angle to influencers, who can say it in their own voice to people who already trust them. It works in reverse too. When an influencer post does well, license it and run it as an ad, and you get their credibility with your targeting.
Whichever you buy, judge it by what it’s for. Asking how many likes a UGC ad got is like asking how many friends a billboard has. Demanding a three-day return on ad spend from an influencer post is about as fair.