A face is one more thing that has to be right

There is a particular kind of advertisement that works by not looking like one. Someone holds a thing up to a phone camera in a kitchen with bad light and says what they think of it, and the whole effect depends on the viewer believing that this happened. That is the format usually called UGC, and it is the one most worth making carefully, because it is the one where being caught costs the most.

Every film asks the viewer to believe something

A product film always makes at least one implicit claim: that the object on screen is the object that will arrive. That claim is the reason a product video can be worth more than a product photograph — it shows the thing from more angles, in motion, doing what it does — and it is also the reason a video that flatters the product is worse than no video at all. The parcel has to keep the promise the film made.

A UGC film adds a second claim on top of the first, and it is easy to add without noticing: that a person exists who thinks this. When that person is generated, the film is asking a stranger to believe two things at once. The product claim you can control, by shooting from a real photograph of the real object. The person claim is harder, because you are not just asserting that someone liked it — you are showing a face, and faces are the thing human beings inspect most closely and forgive least.

This is not an argument against ever showing one. It is an argument for knowing when you have spent that credibility and what you bought with it.

Four of the nine styles show nobody

UGC is not a single kind of film. It has nine styles you can shoot, and four of them need no face on camera:

• Voiceover over b-roll. Somebody narrates while the camera stays on the product. There is a voice, so there is still a person implied — but no face to inspect.
• POV. The camera is the buyer's own eyes and hands come in from the bottom of the frame. It shows using the thing rather than talking about it.
• Hands-only. No face and nothing said. Hands, the product, and what it does.
• ASMR. Also silent of speech, and carried by contact sounds — the click, the unwrap, the pour — shot slow and close.

The last two are worth separating out, because they make no spoken assertion whatsoever. A film in which nobody appears and nobody speaks cannot misrepresent a customer, for the straightforward reason that it never depicts one. Whatever else is true about it, that entire category of risk is gone.

The heuristic: count what has to be true

When you are choosing a style, the useful question is not which looks best in the picker. It is how many separate things a viewer has to accept before they accept the film:

• One thing. Hands-only and ASMR: the product is what it looks like. That is the whole ask.
• Two things. Voiceover and POV: the product is what it looks like, and somebody genuinely uses it this way. No face, but a stated point of view.
• Three things. Talking head, day in the life, three things, skit, street interview: the product, the point of view, and this specific person who holds it.

Each step up buys something real. A face carries warmth and specificity that hands cannot, and a spoken line can make a point that no amount of footage will. The mistake is paying for the third thing when the first would have done — using a talking head to say something a close-up of the object already proves.

A practical rule that follows from it: if the point you are making is about how the product behaves, show it behaving. If the point is about how owning it feels, that is when a person earns their place in the frame. A demonstration does not need a narrator agreeing with it.

The claim is the part you always write

There is one thing every UGC style asks for regardless of who appears, and it is the sentence saying what the product does for the buyer. That is deliberate. The photograph can supply the object and the style can supply the staging, but neither of them can know what the thing is actually for, and neither can check whether what you said about it is true.

So that sentence deserves the attention that might otherwise go to picking a look. Keep it to what you would be willing to defend to a customer holding the product: what it does, not how much better it is than something unnamed. Numbers and comparisons are exactly where an advertisement stops being a description and starts being a position you have to hold — and a faceless film making an overreaching claim is not more honest than a face making a modest one. The style changes who is asking the viewer to believe you. It does not change whether they should.

Where this leaves the choice

Picking a UGC style looks like a question of taste and mostly is not. It is a question of how much you are asking a stranger to take on trust, and the cheapest films to defend are the ones that ask for the least. Start from hands-only or ASMR and add a person when you can say what their presence is doing that the product could not do alone. Most of the time you will find it is doing something. Some of the time you will find that it is not, and that is a film you can run with more confidence than the one you were about to make.