UGC Pro 🦄

Someone pinch me 🥹 Tell me how I just had my UGC journey and 10-year business story featured in freaking @Entrepreneur?! This is for sure one of those ‘Mama I made it’ moments that I’ll always cherish. Special thank you to Amanda Breen and @jlthoms for bringing this piece to life, and for giving the UGC community a spotlight. 💓 I’ve said it before, I’ll say it till I’m blue in the face: this is a win for the UGC community at large. A rising tide lifts ALL boats! 🛶✨📈

The BEST UGC creators aren't necessarily the ones who make the best-looking videos (although that's certainly a plus depending on the campaign I'm hiring for). But you know what makes a creator someone I want to work with again and again? They understand WHY their videos convert. #UGC #UGCcreator #UGCcommunity 👏

There's a difference between having 10 years of experience and having one year of experience repeated 10 times. 👀 TL;DR: Experience alone doesn't build expertise. Reflection, pattern recognition, experimentation, and actually LEARNING from what you've done? GREAT. But ALSO, at what scale are we talking? Hundreds or MILLIONS in monthly ad spend? Because the stakes, complexity, and volume of decisions you're making can look VERY different depending on the environments you've operated in. And I'd argue that expertise compounds when you're not just repeating the work, but continually increasing the depth, complexity, and stakes of the problems you're learning to solve. 😉

For over a decade, I thought the way I approached creative was just common sense… Why WOULDN'T you look at performance before deciding what to make next? Why WOULDN'T you question a process if you could see an obvious hole in it? It took me YEARS to realize that what I considered common sense wasn't necessarily common practice. 👀 And that's a huge part of what I'm excited to bring to my role as Head of Performance Creative at ContentJet, because I want to build a department where questioning processes, connecting creative decisions to performance, and using what we learn to inform what we make next aren't just things we encourage, they're baked into how we operate. Because if there's one thing I've learned from building and leading creative teams, it's that good strategic judgment shouldn't be limited to the people at the top. It should be something we're actively developing across the entire team. 😉

If your team can only maintain quality by producing less, shouldn't we be questioning WHY the process can't support more? I genuinely don't understand why we've accepted the idea that producing MORE creative automatically means sacrificing quality, and I'd go as far as to argue that creative quality and creative volume aren't mutually exclusive, but that the real bottleneck is often the process supporting both (yay admin). 💀 I've spent years building and restructuring creative teams from the ground up, and if those experiences have taught me anything, it's that the goal shouldn't be to reduce output to protect quality, but to build systems that allow teams to increase production without sacrificing the strategic thinking that makes the creative worth producing in the first place. I'll stand on my soapbox all damn day, until I'm blue in the face and the cows come home, saying the SAME thing over and over again: SCALING CREATIVE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO MEAN LOWERING YOUR STANDARDS. 👀

I think one of the biggest mistakes brands are making right now is confusing creative VOLUME with creative DIVERSITY. 👀 You can launch 100 new ads this month and still only be testing 5 actual ideas… except you wasted 20x the budget. Just because you labeled it an A/B doesn't automatically mean you're testing different strategic hypotheses. And this is something I've become increasingly passionate about after spending 10+ years in the thick of performance creative. More deliverables ≠ more meaningful learning. The real question isn't how many ads your team can produce, it's how many different bets you're making, what you're learning from each, and how those insights influence what gets made next. That's a big part of what we're focused on at @ContentjetUGC: scaling creator-led performance creative without treating strategy and production like they're two separate problems. Because creative at scale should mean scaling the number of opportunities you have to find your next winner, not just scaling your output. How are YOU approaching this?

Q4 thought: I actually think strategy is where creative quality starts to slip first, especially when teams are stretched thin and start oversimplifying their approach just to keep up with production demands. And it's low-key insidious, almost like an evil spirit creeping in unnoticed (yes, I'm feeling festive 🎃👻), because before you know it, you're producing MORE creative without actually testing anything meaningful or learning enough to inform what you should make next, which defeats the purpose of scaling in the first place! 😅 Creator fit is definitely important, but it's also just ONE ingredient in the recipe for effective performance creative, and even the perfect creator can't save a weak test. Then again, what do I know? Come fight with me in the comments, I need to let off some steam. 😂

"I don't know who needs to hear this"—I know exactly who needs to hear this. 💀 Creators considering a mentor: There’s a massive difference between advice that sounds good in theory and advice that still works when there’s a real client, real budget, real team and real media spend attached to it.

Unconscious competence is FASCINATING to me because the better you get at something, the easier it becomes to underestimate how difficult it actually is for someone else. What feels like common sense to you might actually be the result of thousands of decisions, mistakes, experiments, and lessons you've internalized over the years. And learning how to articulate that knowledge, let alone teach someone else how to apply it, is an entirely different skill. 👀 It's something I've become increasingly aware of over the years as I've gone from being the person DOING the creative work to building and leading teams responsible for producing it. Think about it... just because something makes perfect sense in MY head doesn't mean I've done a good job explaining the WHY behind it to someone else. And that's a huge part of what I'm excited to continue developing at @ContentjetUGC, building systems, frameworks, and feedback loops that help turn individual expertise into something an entire team can learn from and apply independently. I've learned that knowing how to do something really well and figuring out how to get an entire team to do it just as well are two VERY different challenges, and personally, I find the latter a hell of a lot more interesting. 👀

I think one of the biggest mistakes in the UGC space is treating “creator → mentor” like a natural promotion path... it isn’t. 💀

A creator who knows how to film a good video is great. A creator who understands WHY that video should work, who it's for, what objection it's overcoming, and how its performance will be measured? HOLD MY DRINK! Oh did I say HOLD it? I meant CHEERS FRIEND! 🤣 And this is EXACTLY why I've been advocating for UGC creators to learn creative strategy since launching UGC Pro in 2022 AND why I've been operating and marketing myself as equally analytical/data-minded as I am creative since 2016! Which is how I got my foot in the door with brands and agencies early in my career, without a college degree (back when it wasn't the "norm" to own the title college drop-out in this industry). I made sure I wasn't just showing them what I could create, I could explain WHY I made certain creative decisions and how those decisions connected to performance. Being equally analytical and creative made it a whole lot easier to stand out, and for over four years, that's exactly what we've been teaching our UGC Pro students. The goal was never just to teach creators how to make content, that comes naturally for most people fluent in social media. It was to teach them how to THINK about the content they're making. ☝️

One of the biggest mistakes we make when evaluating talent is confusing someone's ability to explain a concept with their ability to actually execute it. Knowing all the right terminology doesn't automatically mean you know how to apply it, and not having the vocabulary doesn't mean you lack the skill. 👀 ALSO, while I'm at it, just because someone uses industry jargon fluently (which I catch myself doing out of habit ALL the time) doesn't automatically mean they're trying to disguise themselves as knowing more than they actually do. All three things can be true! 😂 And instead of overanalyzing someone's choice of words or trying to poke holes in how they explain something, why not save everyone some time and look at their actual work, portfolio, and case studies? Because at the end of the day, I'd rather evaluate someone's ability to DO the work than how convincingly they can TALK about it. 😉

Nearly 20,000 people have learned through our free and paid resources since 2022. And something I've realized is that I know where a lot of their journeys started, but I don't necessarily know where they ended up. 🥹 If you ever took one of our courses, attended a live session, used our resources, or were part of the community, I genuinely want to know: Where are you now? What are you doing? What did learning UGC lead to? I want to hear ALL of it. ❤️

In performance creative, the rules change way too often. The moment you take yourself too far out of the game, you start losing access to the nuance of what’s actually happening in real time!

I use acronyms and marketing jargon ALL the time, but I make it a point to explain what the heck they mean instead of assuming everyone knows WTF I'm talking about. And it's because I VIVIDLY remember learning marketing terminology years ago and feeling unbelievably self-conscious about getting “caught” not knowing something. And without a formal education or degree to point to, I genuinely felt like a fraud when, in reality, I was just experiencing something way too common in performance creative. 😅 And yes, this was before AI chatbots could explain something in two seconds or video courses were readily available. Some of us had to figure things out ourselves or work up the courage to raise our hands and ask for help. 😒 So consider this your reminder that you don't need to know the terminology for something to be exceptionally good at it. Sometimes you develop the skill before you even learn what it's called. And not knowing the language of an industry doesn't mean you don't belong in it. Don't confuse unfamiliarity with terminology for a lack of intelligence, ability, or potential. 🫶

Being a great mentor doesn’t automatically make you a better creator, strategist, editor or service provider. In the same way that being great at any of those things doesn’t automatically make you a great mentor.

Knowing how to create content people watch vs. creative that drives measurable business outcomes are two VERY different beasts. Organic social and paid ads are NOT the same. Is the gray area thinner than EVER BEFORE? Absolutely. But the two can (and SHOULD) inform each other. Because when you're only looking at one side, your strategy becomes a reflection of the echo chamber you've built in your own little corner of the internet, rather than the bigger picture of what actually resonates with consumers AND drives results.