UGC ad creative for DTC brands

Your best ad dies every three weeks. Creators take three weeks to replace it.

Hook Cadence produces UGC-style video ads at the pace paid social actually burns through them: 15 test-ready variants a month, delivered in batches within 72 hours of brief approval.

Licensed on-camera actors. Your real product footage. No fake testimonials.

What you get

A batch built for testing, not a video built to look nice.

Every batch is the same body with different openings, so your media buyer can isolate what actually holds attention instead of comparing two videos that differ in ten ways.

15 variants a month

Three concepts, five hooks each. Same spine, different openings — the unit a media buyer can actually read.

72 hours per batch

From brief approval to delivery. Miss the deadline and that batch is free. No performance promises, a deadline we control.

Ready to upload

9:16, captions inside the cross-platform safe zone, with and without music. Nothing left to edit on your side.

How it works

Scripted from what's already winning. Not from a blank page.

01

We read your category first

We pull the ads running in your vertical that have been live 60+ days in the Meta Ad Library, and map which angles are saturated and which nobody is testing. Your hooks come from that map.

02

Licensed actors carry the pitch

Real people who licensed their likeness, with native US voice. No synthetic faces, no uncanny valley, no likeness you'd have to explain.

03

Your footage carries the product

AI cannot render your specific bottle, buckle or label faithfully — so we don't ask it to. Product shots come from your real assets. What's on screen is what ships.

04

You brief us in ten minutes

Product context and the assets you already have. We script, cast, cut, caption and deliver. One contact, one channel, no creator to chase.

The part nobody else writes down

Our actors present. They don't pretend to have bought.

Since the FTC's 2024 rule on fake reviews and testimonials, an actor saying "I've been using this for three weeks" is the advertiser's liability — not the creator's. Penalties run to tens of thousands of dollars per violation.

So we write presenter scripts. Same stopping power, none of the exposure, and you never have to think about it. It also converts better than a generic three-week testimonial nobody believes.

  • No fake testimonials. No "real customer" framing, no invented usage stories.
  • No performance guarantees. We control the creative and the deadline. You control the account, the landing page and the offer.
  • No media buying. We don't touch your campaigns or your reporting.
  • No health or results claims. We turn down beauty before-and-after, supplements and anything with a medical claim.
Pricing

Priced per variant, because that's the unit you test.

Month to month. Fifteen days' notice. No lock-in, no minimum term, no setup fee.

Test
$600 / mo
8 variants · $75 each
  • 2 concepts × 4 hooks
  • One batch a month
  • 72-hour delivery
  • Test plan included
Cadence Most brands
$1,100 / mo
15 variants · $73 each
  • 3 concepts × 5 hooks
  • Two batches a month
  • 72-hour delivery
  • Monthly "what won" retro
  • Competitor teardown at onboarding
Scale
$2,000 / mo
30 variants · $67 each
  • 6 concepts × 5 hooks
  • Four batches a month
  • 72-hour delivery
  • Monthly retro + teardown

For comparison: a human UGC creator charges $100–400 per video and takes one to three weeks, with a brief to write and reshoots to chase. Fifteen human videos land between $1,500 and $6,000. A creative agency starts around $3,000 a month.

Start here

Three creatives, free, in 72 hours.

We're new, and we'd rather prove it than claim it. You get one concept in three hooks, cut with your footage and ready to run. No invoice, no contract, no call required.

01

You send product context and the assets you already have. Ten minutes.

02

We deliver three variants within 72 hours. You run them in a live campaign within two weeks.

03

You share hook rate, CTR and CPA. We publish the results anonymised — "a pet brand at $X a month".

Request a pilot slot

Three pilot slots open at a time. We take pet, tech accessories and home brands running UGC on Meta or TikTok.

Questions we actually get

Straight answers.

Does AI-generated UGC look fake?

Our actors are real people who licensed their likeness — not synthetic faces. But we don't sell you "nobody will notice". We sell fifteen angles to test for the price of one shoot. Some categories suit this better than others: if your product depends on a visible before-and-after on someone's skin or body, a real customer will always beat us, and we'll tell you so.

Can AI actually show my product?

No, and that's why we don't ask it to. Generative video cannot reproduce your specific label, buckle or texture reliably. The actor carries the script; your own product footage carries the product. If you only have stills, we can animate them as an add-on.

We already use Arcads or Creatify.

Then you know the output quality. The question is who writes the scripts, picks the angles, produces the variants and cuts the product footage in. If that's you at eleven at night, that's the part we remove.

Can you show results?

Not yet — we're new, and we won't borrow someone else's numbers. That's exactly why the first three creatives are free: you run them, and the numbers are yours before you pay anything.

Who do you turn down?

Brands under roughly $5k a month in ad spend, because there's no testing budget for variants to matter. Anything with health or results claims. Adult. And anyone who wants scripted customer testimonials — that's the wrong product, and we'd rather say so upfront.