A skincare client asked me last month whether they could cut their content budget by seventy percent and let customers make everything instead. They had a deck ready. Slide four was a grid of real customer photos and it looked, honestly, wonderful. Warmer than anything the agency had shot.
Slide five was the hashtag they wanted to launch.
I asked what they planned to do with the posts that came in off-brand. Not offensive, nobody worries about the obvious ones. Just off. Wrong lighting, wrong register, a caption implying the product treats a condition it does not treat.
The room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when the question was not on the agenda.
User-generated content is not free content. It is a trade: you get volume and credibility, and you hand over the right to decide what your brand sounds like on any given Tuesday.
Sometimes that trade is excellent. Glossier built a company on it because what customers naturally said about Glossier was already what Glossier wanted said. The voices were aligned before any campaign existed. Salt & Straw gets the same gift here in Portland, where customers photograph the cone in exactly the delighted register the brand uses itself. Nobody had to coach that into being.
It fails when a brand reaches for UGC as a budget solution rather than a voice decision. This year has produced a great deal of that. Production got hard in March, budgets got cut in April, and asking customers to fill the grid started looking less like strategy and more like relief.
What separates the two cases is not photo quality. It is whether the brand still has a voice of its own running alongside the borrowed one. UGC works as a chorus, but it cannot carry the melody. When a company posts nothing but reposts for six months, the audience does not conclude that the brand is authentic. They conclude, correctly, that nobody is home.
UGC works as a chorus, but it cannot carry the melody.
So there are three things I make clients settle before they launch anything hashtag-shaped. One, what you will not repost, written down, in advance, before the awkward one arrives. Two, who has authority to say no at nine on a Saturday night, because that is when it will arrive. Three, what the brand itself is still saying in its own voice while the chorus sings behind it.
None of that is complicated. It is just unglamorous, and it does not fit on slide five, and it is the entire difference between a campaign and an abdication.
Truffles knocked a mug off my desk during that call, which is the only content either cat has ever generated on purpose. Barnaby watched and took no position. I would still not hand them the feed.