The user generated content examples worth studying share one thing. The brand gave customers a reason to film, and then stepped back. Below are eight campaigns from named consumer companies, grouped by the mechanism that produced the content. For each one you get what the brand did, why customers made the content themselves, and what a small company can copy without the budget.
A note on where this comes from. Underboss did not work on any of these campaigns and has no inside knowledge of them. They are other companies' public work, read from outside. Every fact comes from the company's own announcement, a company filing or published reporting, and each source is named in the text and linked at the end.
What counts as user generated content
User generated content, UGC for short, is content about a brand made by people who do not work for it. Customers, fans, and sometimes creators answering an open call. A video the brand scripts and pays a creator to film is an ad with a different face in it. That can be useful, but it is a different thing, and it behaves differently.
Customer content exists because a customer wanted to make it. That want is the scarce part. Cameras are everywhere and editing is free. What you cannot buy off a shelf is a person's own reason to point the camera at your product. Every example below is a way of creating that reason, or of finding it where it already exists.
| Mechanism | Examples in this guide |
|---|---|
| A contest that pays customers for their footage | GoPro, Apple |
| A challenge where the customer makes the ad | Doritos, Cetaphil |
| Fans who started before the brand did | Stanley, The Pink Stuff, Little Moons |
| Reviews and photos on the product page | Rent the Runway |
Contests that pay customers for their footage
GoPro: the Million Dollar Challenge
What the brand did. In 2023, in the fifth edition of the contest, GoPro asked owners of its newest cameras to send in raw clips through its app or its website. According to the company's own press release, it received 42,446 clips from 126 countries, 66% more than the year before. GoPro chose 55 creators from 21 countries, cut their clips into a three-minute highlight reel, and split $1 million equally between them. Each received $18,181.81.
Why customers made the content. The product is a camera, so every customer already holds footage. The contest gives them a reason to send it in. The equal split matters too. A first-time entrant's ten seconds are worth exactly as much as a professional's, so ordinary owners have a real reason to enter.
What a small company can copy. The million is the part you can skip. Copy the standing offer: send us the clip, and if we use it we pay you and credit you. A small brand can run that with a fixed fee per clip used and a clear deadline. Keep the reel at the end as well. People enter to see their own clip in the finished video.
Apple: the Shot on iPhone Challenge
What the brand did. In January 2019, Apple invited iPhone users to post their best photos publicly on Instagram or Twitter with one hashtag, or to send them by email. Entries were open from January 22 to February 7. A panel of judges picked 10 winners. Apple's announcement said the winning photos would appear on billboards in selected cities, in Apple stores and online, and that the winning photographers would receive a licensing fee.
Why customers made the content. The prize was a kind of exposure money does not easily buy: your photo on a billboard. And the hashtag made every entry public. The entries were the campaign before a single winner was chosen.
What a small company can copy. Make the entry public by design, and make the prize a placement you control. Your packaging, your homepage, the wall of your shop. Pay a licensing fee as well. Apple is not short of lawyers, and it put the fee in the announcement.
UGC campaign examples where the customer makes the ad
Doritos: Crash the Super Bowl
What the brand did. Doritos ran this contest from 2006 to 2016 and brought it back for the 2025 game. Marketing Brew reported that the brand received more than 2,000 entries. Judges cut them to 25 semifinalists and then three finalists, and fans voted for two weeks. The winning spot, an alien story called Abduction by Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell, aired during the Super Bowl. Its makers received $1 million and a trip to the game. Doritos supplied a toolkit of music and brand assets and did not produce the ads.
Why customers made the content. The prize was the size of a career. Marketing Brew reported that Doritos aimed its outreach at independent filmmakers, film students and creators, and noted that past entries had launched directors' careers. The brand also kept its hands off. Its senior director of marketing told Marketing Brew the brand wanted consumers to lead and accepted the risk that came with that.
What a small company can copy. The toolkit and the hands-off rule. Give people your logo, product shots, a sound and a one-line brief. Then do not rewrite what comes back. The prize can be small if the stage is real: the winning video becomes your actual ad for the month, with budget behind it.
Cetaphil: a hashtag challenge with a prize money cannot buy
What the brand did. According to a case study published by TikTok, Cetaphil ran a contest in North America called #FaceofCetaphil. It used a TikTok format in which the brand sets a brief and creators post videos that answer it under one hashtag. The brief was a beauty transformation using Cetaphil products. The incentive was a chance to attend New York Fashion Week. The figures in the case study are reported by the brand: 223 creators, 426 videos and 29 million video views. Cetaphil also bought ads to push the hashtag, so those views were not all free.
Why customers made the content. One clear brief, one hashtag, and a prize that is hard to get any other way. The format lives inside the app, so entering takes about as much effort as posting any other video.
What a small company can copy. The brief. One sentence, one hashtag, one prize. Look at the size of the numbers too. 223 creators is a room, not a stadium. A small brand with a few hundred real customers on the platform is closer to this than it thinks. And read platform case studies with care. The numbers are the brand's own, and platforms publish the campaigns that went well.
Examples of user generated content the brand did not plan
The three examples in this group began with no campaign at all. A customer made something first. The brand's whole job was to notice and respond well.
Stanley: a blog that sold the cup, and a car fire
What the brand did. CNBC Make It told the first half of this story. The Buy Guide is a shopping blog run by a group of women in Utah. One of its founders bought a Stanley Quencher cup in 2017 and kept recommending it to her readers. In 2019 she asked Stanley to keep making the cup. Stanley offered her a wholesale order instead. She bought 5,000 cups and sold them within days. After Terence Reilly became Stanley's president in 2020, the company treated the blog as a partner and launched new colours with it. CNBC reported, from data it reviewed, that Stanley's revenue went from $73 million in 2019 to a projected $750 million or more in 2023.
The second half came in November 2023. A customer posted a TikTok of her car after a fire. Her Stanley cup was still in the cup holder, with ice still inside. Fox Business reported that the video had nearly 60 million views. The next day Stanley posted a reply video. In it, Reilly thanked her and said the company would send her cups and would like to replace her car.
Why customers made the content. Neither moment was planned by the brand. The blog's founders loved a product and wanted it to keep existing. The customer had an astonishing thing to show. Stanley's contribution was to say yes, twice, and quickly.
What a small company can copy. Two things. First, find the customers who already sell for you and give them stock, early access and a say in the next colour. Second, decide in advance who is allowed to say yes fast. Stanley's reply came the next day. Most companies would still be scheduling the meeting about it.
The Pink Stuff: a cleaning paste and one fan's posts
What the brand did. Very little at first, which is the point. Entrepreneur, relaying reporting by the New York Times, wrote that in 2018 the British company Star Brands made The Pink Stuff for only a few hours each month at a factory near Birmingham. Then Sophie Hinchliffe, who shares her home cleaning routine on Instagram, featured the paste in her posts. Cleaning videos followed on TikTok. Star Brands says those videos have been viewed more than 2 billion times. Annual sales quadrupled from 2018 to about $125 million, according to the Times figures Entrepreneur cites.
Why customers made the content. The product shows its result on camera. A dirty surface, the paste, a clean surface. A before and after is easy to film and satisfying to watch, and anyone with a stained oven can make one.
There is a cost. A managing director at Star Brands told the Times that this kind of fame is "a little scary", because the company has little control over what is said.
What a small company can copy. Ask whether your product has a visible before and after. If it does, show customers the shot by posting it first on your own account, filmed plainly. If the result of your product is invisible, this route is harder, and one of the contest mechanisms above will serve you better.
Little Moons: joining a trend customers started
What the brand did. In February 2021, The Grocer reported that TikTok users in the UK were posting videos of themselves buying and eating Little Moons, a brand of mochi ice cream. The brand's own account joined in. It posted a video of a trip to "big Tesco" to hunt for the product and invited others to do the same. Little Moons told The Grocer that its Tesco sales were up more than 700% in a week compared with an average week in December 2020, and that Waitrose sales were up 350% in two days. Those figures are the brand's own.
Why customers made the content. The hunt gave people something to do. Find it in the shop, film the first bite. It is a small story anyone can repeat, and each video is an instruction for the next person.
What a small company can copy. When customers start a format, join it as a participant, on your own account, in the same rough style. Do not polish it and do not add a logo animation. Check your stock before you add fuel, too. The Grocer reported that Little Moons sold out completely at one online retailer.
Reviews and photos on the product page
Rent the Runway: photo reviews as the fitting room
What the brand did. Rent the Runway rents out designer clothes. In its annual report to the SEC for the fiscal year that ended in January 2025, the company says customers had posted 56.5 million reviews, and that customers can leave photo reviews of the items they rented. The same filing cites a March 2023 survey of its subscribers in which 75% said they had posted themselves on social media wearing a rented item.
Why customers made the content. There is no prize here. A review answers the question the reviewer once had herself: how will this fit a person shaped like me? People answer it because someone else's answer helped them first.
What a small company can copy. Ask for a photo in the email that follows a purchase, timed for when the product has just been used. Put the photos on the product page, next to the buy button, instead of on a gallery page nobody visits. This is the cheapest mechanism in this guide and the one most small brands skip.
What I learned from paying for the other kind
This section is the only one about my own work, and it is here as a warning. On a dating app I built and own, roughly 4,000 euros of produced and paid UGC converted zero users. The organic build on the same app collected a 10,000 person waitlist in five months of active collection at $0 paid.
That is one product, and it is mine, so read it as one case. But it is why I separate the two kinds. The paid videos looked like customer content. No customer had wanted to make them.
What the eight UGC examples have in common
- The customer had a reason of their own. Money, a billboard, a career, a question about fit, or simply a good story to tell.
- Entering was easy and public. A hashtag, an upload in an app, a review box.
- The brand gave up some control. Doritos did not produce the ads. Star Brands does not script the cleaning videos.
- The brand showed the result where others could see it. A reel, a billboard, a product page, a reply video.
- The brand answered fast when a customer went first.
Notice what is missing from that list. None of the eight depends on a big following at the start. They depend on customers, a reason and a place to show the result.
User generated content marketing examples you can run on a small budget
Put the mechanisms in order of cost and a small consumer company gets a working sequence. Start at the top and add a step only when the one before it is running.
- Find what already exists. Search your brand and product name on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Save every customer video and photo you find.
- Ask each person for permission in writing before you reuse anything. Pay them or credit them, and say which.
- Add a photo request to the email that follows each order. Put the photos on the product page.
- Set one standing brief: one sentence, one hashtag, one small prize each month. Make the prize a placement you control.
- Repost the best customer videos on your own accounts, with credit, in the rough style they were filmed in.
- Put paid budget only behind the customer videos that already held attention with no money behind them.
Step five needs somewhere to post. Customer content works best when the brand already runs its own accounts with formats people recognise, because a repost lands in front of followers who know the name. That part is what Underboss builds: short-form video formats on a consumer company's own Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts, with paid budget only behind pieces that already worked for free.
Read the organic social media growth strategies →
Where UGC examples mislead
Every list like this one is a list of winners. Nobody publishes the hashtag that got eleven entries, nine of them from staff. So take the mechanisms and leave the numbers.
Three cautions apply to almost every example above. Scale: GoPro and Apple began with millions of customers who already held footage, and your first contest will be smaller. Source: several of the figures are reported by the brand itself, and I have said so each time. Rights: a public post is not permission to use someone's video in your ad. Get consent in writing, and if you pay or send free product, check the disclosure rules in the countries where you sell.
Key takeaways
- UGC is content customers wanted to make. A paid, scripted creator video is an ad, and it behaves like one.
- Four mechanisms produce it: paying for customer footage, a challenge where the customer makes the ad, backing fans who started first, and photo reviews on the product page.
- The prize does not have to be money. A placement you control often works better.
- Decide in advance who can say yes quickly when a customer posts something good.
- Get written permission before reusing any customer content, and fund only the pieces that already held attention.
If you want to know which of these mechanisms fits your product, ask for the free teardown. Send a link to the product and its channels. Within three days you get a written read on what brings customers in today and what we would build first. No call, and the plan is yours whether or not we work together.