This person doesn’t exist, and they’re recommending you lipstick

Most startups have the same problem when it comes to marketing. They have no physical stores, no celebrity endorsements and no TV ads. They’re usually competing with some conglomerate that has been around for a hundred years that eats up huge chunks of market share and keeps growing without a lot of effort.

Big brands get bigger and small brands don’t have a chance. Even though newer products are often better, the brands themselves lack the recognition and love required to overcome the inertia and fear most people have in trying something new.

But startups have an ace up their sleeve. The customers they do win typically tend to fall in love with them and become advocates for the brands quickly. Allbirds, Wise and Airbnb all grew this way. You couldn’t walk down the street in San Francisco in 2014 without some idiot telling you about his shoes.

Startups quickly realised that having evangelical customers was actually one of the best ways to convince other potential customers to try their products. Around the same time, some clever marketer worked out that these people also have iPhones in their pocket.

And, just like that, User Generated Content (UGC) was born. And it was so effective that it ushered in a whole new era of internet marketing that cut through the noise better than any other form of content at the time.

Naturally, we couldn’t get enough

Who’d have thought that getting your customers to create platform native Trustpilot ads would help you to drive more brand trust and greater conversion through the funnel. This shit was like visual gold. It could work throughout the funnel building brand, driving conversion and solving every customer problem along the way.

But after a while marketers ran into a problem. Just owning an iPhone wasn’t enough. Not everyone with a £1,000 camera in their pocket can shoot videos worth watching. Like your parents. Why do they keep zooming into everything?

The desire for more and more UGC created a new market. The people who got really good at shooting authentic social content starting working out they could do the same for brands. And the content creator industry was born.

It was UGC-as-a-Service. Captivating, interesting or just absurdly attractive people starting talking into their phones about products and services they’d literally never heard of because marketers couldn’t get enough of this kind of content.

Literally millions of videos flooded the internet. The same format, for the most part, repeated over and over again for every conceivable brand and product you can imagine. And we just expected our audiences to open up and gobble it down.

But it was missing the most important bit.