Why leaving authentic influencer and user generated content out of your paid media mix is a costly mistake

Influencer and user generated content is key to winning the confidence of consumers, say top digital agency’s brand strategists and influencer marketing specialists.

Influencer and user generated content are 2 of the most powerful tools in advertising right now. Yet despite earning their place as a key, measurable components of the modern media mix, many brands still aren’t making the most of them. Here Nicola Ashe, Strategic Business Director at leading digital agency TDMC (The Digital Media Collective), and Zandile Dlamini, TDMC’s Strategic Content Partnerships Director, unpack the valuable role customer content plays within a brand’s paid media strategy, and how forward-thinking brands and agencies are deploying them to maximise returns.

UGC vs content creation

Most brands now work across 3 distinct content types:

• Brand-produced content: Developed through creative agencies to build awareness and communicate the brand’s key message. “Brand-produced content is art-directed, copy-approved, visually consistent and brand safe. It builds awareness, establishes identity, and positions the brand in a category. It is built to communicate,” says Ashe.

• Influencer content: Here creators are selected strategically and given the freedom to create authentically while still working towards a campaign objective.

• UGC: Genuine customer content that acts as social proof and can also be licensed by a brand and amplified through paid media. “True UGC content is organic in origin: created by customers, community members, or fans for their own audience not for the brand,” says Ashe. “This distinction matters because audiences can tell – and in South Africa particularly, the penalty for inauthenticity is steep.”

As Ashe points out, UGC content answers the question that brand content fundamentally cannot: ‘But does it actually work?’. “The rough edge of a shaky camera, an unscripted reaction, a real kitchen or a real trial – these are not imperfections. They are trust signals,” says Ashe.

Dlamini says influencer content naturally bridges the gap between branded assets and UGC – influencers help establish credibility and trust, while UGC reinforces and scales that trust by showing real customers having similar experiences. “One of my key measures of a successful influencer campaign is, of course, engagement. But what excites me even more is when consumers start using the same hashtags as our influencers and create their own content around the campaign,” says Dlamini. “That’s when we know we’ve done a good job. It shows the audience hasn’t just consumed the content; they’ve engaged with it enough to become advocates themselves and that’s where influencer content helps spark genuine UGC.”

Perfecting paid media strategy

A mature paid media strategy deploys each content type where it performs best. Brand content drives awareness at the top of the funnel, influencer content adds credibility in the mid-funnel, and UGC closes the loop at the mid-to-lower funnel, where intent is highest and scepticism is strongest.

“The mistake most agencies make is treating these as interchangeable or, worse, using influencer and UGC purely as a cost-reduction strategy. At TDMC, we integrate all 3 within a broader media strategy that understands each content type’s job,” says Ashe.

Data and authenticity

“Authenticity” may have become marketing’s most overused word, but behind the buzzword the performance data is compelling. Studies consistently show UGC and authentic influencer-based ads outperform brand-produced equivalents across click-through rates, cost-per-acquisition, and purchase intent, particularly for audiences already in a consideration or decision mindset.

Dlamini says at TDMC they have a unique approach to influencer content, taking advantage of engaging influencers they trust and giving them the freedom to put their own spin on the content they create. “TDMC actually sits in a small grey area between brand and influencer – we use and pay influencers to create content for their own channels about the brand, but we allow them to create with their own lens within brand guardrails. This is fundamentally different to most influencer agencies who prefer to ’script’ the outcome.”

She says they identify influencers who have a good organic reach who can create within the confines of the brand brief but stay true to their own personality and audience. “That authenticity is key as this is where followers will spot a fake alignment from a mile away. For a consumer weighing up a purchase, a real person’s unscripted experience functions as social proof in a way that a polished brand video never can. The conversion lift this generates at the bottom of the funnel is where it earns its place in paid strategy,” says Dlamini.

Critically though, authenticity cannot be manufactured. Audiences – and Meta’s ad algorithms – are increasingly sophisticated at detecting content that mimics UGC aesthetics without genuine authenticity behind it. Dlamini warns that brands who brief creators to “make it look like a real video” are investing in a diminishing return. “The advantage comes from the real thing.”

The South African landscape – and why different rules apply

South Africa is not a proxy market for global trends. A deeply connected community culture – across WhatsApp groups, community Facebook pages, and informal review networks – means genuine peer endorsement carries more weight here than in markets where brand messaging is more readily accepted. Facebook remains a dominant paid media channel, particularly for audiences over 30. Language matters too. Content in Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, Afrikaans, or everyday South African code-switching carries a resonance polished brand content rarely achieves.

As Dlamini points out, content done well taps directly into this unique cultural dynamic. “At TDMC, creator selection is never arbitrary. We match people to objectives, not just aesthetics, because the SA audience is too culturally connected and too sceptical of performative marketing for a misaligned voice to go unnoticed. We send content back if we feel a creator is forcing a version of themselves or creating inauthentic content. We work with many mass market brands, and we never work with someone we feel doesn’t understand the nuances of a brand, food or culture.”

Where brands go wrong

The most common failure is process, not creative. Brands find content they want to use but have no rights agreement in place. Others over-specify briefs until the authenticity is briefed out. At TDMC, activation is built on 3 non-negotiables: a rights acquisition framework, a briefing approach that protects authenticity while meeting brand-safety requirements, and a paid adaptation process that optimises without sanitising.

“The best briefs define the problem, not the execution,” says Ashe. “A directive that says, ‘We need you to show how this fits into your morning routine’ produces more usable content than, ‘Please film a 30-second vertical video starting with a close-up of the product then cut into your kitchen saying…’. The latter produces a low-budget ad. The former produces authentic content.”

Placing strategy before content

Looking ahead, UGC’s role as a trust signal will only become more valuable as AI-generated content saturates digital environments. “Brands that build campaigns that ignite UGC pipelines now are investing in an appreciating asset,” says Ashe.

Where most agencies lead with a creator roster and work backwards to a strategy, Ashe says TDMC leads with a media objective and builds a content ecosystem around it. “That means each is being deployed at the right moment in the right channel to move the right audience,” says Ashe. The result is a paid media offering where influencer-style UGC doesn’t replace influencer or brand production, it completes them, and where brands are building something more durable than a campaign, they are investing in a content ecosystem that compounds in effectiveness over time.

“At TDMC, the question we ask every client isn’t ‘Should we use influencer-style UGC?’. It’s ‘Where in the customer journey is trust the missing ingredient?’. That question gets you to the right answer every time and it’s a very different conversation to the one most agencies are having,” says Ashe.

As influencer and user generated content matures as a paid media discipline, the agencies that lead will be those treating it with the same strategic rigour as every other element of the media mix. And at the heart of that is understanding the consumer and building a connection between them and a brand, says Dlamini.

“The biggest mistake agencies make is becoming disconnected from the consumer. At TDMC, we don’t have that problem because we are the consumer. We lead with strategy, we consider the full digital ecosystem, and we give creators the freedom to speak in their mother tongue, to their community, in a way that feels natural. We also refuse to box the mass consumer in. A mom who buys the product also likes humour, recipe content, lifestyle content – she contains multitudes,” says Dlamini. “Our job is to reflect that. UGC is the bridge between brand and consumer, and we are the architects of that bridge.”