User-generated content has been a winning content format for one simple reason - people tend to trust a real person more than a polished ad.

Back in the day, it was an indie brand's secret weapon. When smaller brands didn't have a multi-million dollar budget for mainstream media or mega-influencers, UGC was how they drove reach and sales. Creator product seeding and UGC at scale still works wonders today, but the landscape is now shifting, with two key factors working behind the scenes.

The Big Players are Doubling Down

Bigger companies have arrived and are doubling down on the format. It's not that they weren't investing here before, but the scale of their spend on creators is about to increase and shake up the space. When a multinational like Unilever announces it's going to start allocating half of its global media investment towards creators and social-first channels, more big players will follow suit and scale their investments too. And we know what happens next. We've seen this play out before with other digital channels like Facebook ads in days past. Early movers got cheap reach because there was less competitive saturation, and over time costs began to climb and brands had to work harder to win. Top creator talent is the same. Demand for the top creators is set to surge, putting upward pressure on prices.

Meta's Content Demands are Endless

There's a second force pushing content demands and budgets up that you're probably feeling hit hard right now. Meta now demands more creative assets than ever before. Meta's old system worked best when you made a few great ad concepts, with a few variations of the same concept. The new Meta ad engine works differently. It short, it looks at each person one by one and picks the concept most likely to land with them. And to do that well, Meta needs a higher volume of genuinely different ad concepts to choose from, not slight variations of one. So targeting matters less now, and the variety of your ad creative matters more.

What This Means for Brand and Marketing Leaders

Put the two forces together and the squeeze is pretty obvious top creators will cost more, and you will need more content than ever. The instinct for brands naturally is to find ways to make more content for less.

But more of the same only adds to an already saturated social feed. That's why brands have started doing things differently, changing what they make rather than just how much. The algorithms no longer grade you against the brand next door, they now grade you against the best entertainment on the platform. Social feeds now feel more like TV channels with infinite stations, and your content is competing with the best of the best on the feed that day.

So that's why the question has changed from "what's our content strategy?" to "what's our programming strategy?"

Brands are beginning to think more like media companies, and a select few with generous budgets are reshaping their teams, bringing journalists and producers in-house to build modern content and entertainment programming engines. To build a programming strategy, brands can brief internal creatives and external creators across five content layers, to create an endless well of themes to draw from for content production:

• Context: The culture and wider category conversations your customer already lives in.
• Brand Point of View: What you stand for, and what you're against.
• The Claim: What you genuinely do better or differently, told without feeling like a hard pitch.
• Reason to Believe: The proof underneath, the craft, process and founder story that earns long-term trust.
• Transformation: Who your customer becomes with you in their life, the aspirational content people actually share.

Most content sells the product but layers like these tell stories around the product, which is what earns attention and gives people a reason to care. These five layers help build an audience that wants to hear from you beyond the transaction, and they're how a lean team can program like a media company without the media-company budget. The pressure on content budgets isn't going away. This approach builds a deeper pool of creative assets that can work harder, across both organic and paid for the new era of content that we're stepping in.

Author: Effie Asafu-Adjaye
Effie Asafu-Adjaye is the Founder of Beautiful Sparks. Beautiful Sparks helps beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands become known, loved and remembered through sharp positioning, strategic storytelling, and campaigns that connect with the right customers. Read more about Effie here. Linkedin.