UGC talking-head

The default UGC ad: one creator, front camera, arm's length, talking straight into the lens about the product. It is shot to look like footage a real person filmed in their own room rather than anything a crew was involved in.

When to use it

Reach for it when you need volume — this is the format most brands run first and test most hooks against. It carries a spoken argument better than any other format, which makes it the right pick when the product needs explaining rather than just showing.

The beat structure

Hook to camera, then the turn — why it matters, or the problem it kills — then the product lifted beside the face with the label forward, then the payoff and sign-off. Adjacent beats must differ in camera distance and action, or the cut reads as a morph rather than an edit.

The thing to get right

The signature moment is the lift: the creator raises the product beside their face with the front label toward the lens and holds it a beat. An ad that never does this reads as a person talking about nothing in particular.

The format at a glance

• Output — a video ad.
• Structure — 3 beats, each one a separately planned shot.
• Family — Creator & UGC video.
• Recipe id — ugc_selfie, which is what you name when you ask for it by hand or from an agent.

How Hermoso renders it

You do not write a prompt for this. Hermoso reads your brand first — the product, the logo, the palette, the voice — from your website or a short description, then plans the ad against this format: a beat list, the on-screen copy, and the casting if a person appears. The render happens beat by beat, and every word that ends up on screen is composited afterwards by the app rather than painted by the model, so headlines, captions and the end card come out exactly as written instead of warped and half-invented.

If you have a real product photograph, add it. It is the difference between an ad showing your packaging and an ad showing packaging a model imagined, and it is the single biggest quality lever on any product format here.

Related formats

Formats built around a person on camera — the talking-head, the unboxing, the try-on, the demo. These are the highest-volume paid-social formats on TikTok, Reels and Shorts, and the ones where realism matters more than polish.

• UGC unboxing — a creator excitedly opening/unpacking the product
• UGC tutorial / demo — a creator demonstrating how the product works, step by step
• UGC try-on / haul — a creator receiving, trying on or using the product (fashion/beauty/lifestyle)
• UGC product hero — UGC where the PRODUCT is the sole focal hero — close, tactile, hands-on (little/no creator face)
• This gadget saved me — a creator framing the product as the thing that fixed a specific everyday frustration ("this literally saved me")
• Secret hack reveal — a creator revealing a surprising clever hack or hidden use for the product ("nobody knows you can do this")

The full catalog is on the creative recipes index.

Driving it from an agent

Every format on this site is reachable from an AI agent as well as the web studio. Hermoso ships an MCP server, so Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any other MCP client can call plan_ad to draft the creative and render_ad to produce it, name a format as the recipe, and get a finished file back — with the same brand grounding and the same composited-text guarantees. The MCP and CLI overview covers the setup, and the generated tool reference is the complete list.