User-Generated Content From Events: How to Brief Your Audience Without Briefing Them

The most valuable UGC from a brand event is the content the audience creates spontaneously, from genuine enthusiasm, without any direction from the brand.

The brief-your-audience approach to UGC is a logical idea with a counterproductive outcome. An event that asks attendees to post using a specific hashtag, to create certain types of content, or to produce content that serves the brand's communication objectives typically produces less genuine and less commercially effective content than an event that simply gives attendees something genuinely worth sharing and gets out of the way.

The conditions that produce spontaneous high-quality UGC are the same conditions that produce genuinely excellent events: specific designed emotional peak moments, genuine surprise, genuine social connection, and a visual environment that reflects the quality of what is happening within it. When all of these conditions are met, the audience creates content because they genuinely want to share their experience.

The photogenic environment is a necessary but not sufficient condition. A beautiful space produces photographs. A beautiful space with a genuinely excellent experience happening in it produces content with genuine emotional substance: photographs that contain genuine human expression, not posed performance. The difference is immediately visible and the commercial value of the two types of content is not equivalent.

The one directive that consistently increases UGC volume without reducing quality is the creation of a specific moment where the entire room is simultaneously doing something remarkable. The moment the murder mystery verdict is delivered. The moment the cook-off results are announced. These simultaneous collective moments are the easiest type of genuine event content to produce and the easiest to share.

We plan the moments people will want to film before the running order is written, then brief whoever is shooting. The best content comes from people who were never asked to post.