My AI UGC workflow lets me recreate winning ads from my competitors
I've been making AI UGC ads for about a year. The biggest problem was never quality. It wasn't consistency, and it wasn't cost either.
It was thatt we were slow before we ever generated anything. Not slow at production. Slow at working out what the competition was doing better than us, and what actually made our own winners work.
Most tools generate fine once you've got the pieces. Creatify, HeyGen, they'll all get you an ad. Getting the pieces was the hard part. We'd sit with a competitor's ad open in the ads library, watch it twenty times, then spend hours in Claude breaking scripts down and mapping our own hooks. Then take all of it over to whatever we were generating in and start from there.
Two separate workflows. Nothing connecting them. Me in the middle, carrying everything across. Both halves happen in the same place now. Here's our workflow:
We use invideo agents for this. They let us keep our whole catalogue and cast saved in one project, so we're not re-attaching references every time we make something.
But the biggest unlock is that it reads and analyses video too.
Start by feeding in your competitors' ads
Anything that's been live a while, because a long-running ad is a marketing strategy someone is still paying for. You've got no data on those, so longevity is the only signal you get, but it's a real one.
Then hand over your own ads, and everything sitting behind them. Hook rate, watch time, where people drop off.
This way it isn't guessing at what worked when it can see where people actually stayed.
What comes back
The full analysis. What makes their hooks work, what they're doing in the first five seconds, why they hold and where they stop holding.
Then the structure beat by beat, the pacing, where the offer sits relative to the objection. All of it.
For your own ads, where you have the data, it can go further. It'll point at the beat your drop-off sits on, tell you what the hook is failing to do at that point, and suggest alternatives that do the same thing differently
That's the part I was doing badly by eye for a year.
Then ask it to rebuild scripts against it
Not one. Several, so you've got variants of the thing that worked rather than a single attempt at repeating it.
Putting the actual ad together is the easy part
The agent already has your product and your cast, so nothing gets re-described and nothing gets re-uploaded. You're dropping their structure onto your stuff, which is the whole point of doing it this way.
Select your cast, generate one base frame, let it run.
With Seedance 2.0, and now 2.5, the outputs need very little iteration.
And once one is done you can keep going. As many variations off the same structure as you want, different cast, different setting, different way in.
Pro tip
Spin up multiple sub-agents and run five scripts at once instead of working through them one at a time.
Honest caveats
- If you're exploring a new idea, or you just don't have data to build from, any of the UGC generators will do the trick fine. The agentic side only pays off once you've got data or a decent stack of competitor references to work off, and we're still partway through building that ourselves.
- Some ads are load-bearing on the person in them. If the hook is basically "this specific creator is funny," you take the structure and end up with a hollow version of it. We ran three of those before I clocked what was going on.
- A good structure with a rubbish offer under it does exactly as badly as it should. The breakdown tells you how someone built their ad. It has nothing to say about whether yours is worth buying.
That part's still on you.