A UGC library: six months of creative in six weeks

A batch of 240 videos shot over four production days costs less and lasts longer than shooting ten every month. The difference isn't a volume discount — it's a fundamentally different economics of working with creative.

Why per-piece production loses

The classic cycle: a creative burns out — shoot a new one. Every time you start from scratch: brief, cast, location, edit. Between "burned out" and "new one is live" you lose two to three weeks, during which buying runs on declining engagement.

Unit economics are different too. The main costs in a production day aren't the day itself but the prep: casting, props, location. Spread across thirty videos, they bring the per-video cost to three to four times lower than when spread across three.

What gets shot in one production day

One brief, three to four faces, six to eight hook variations per face, two to three middle variations, and two endings. A single production day yields 40–60 edit combinations, of which 30–40 are viable for buying.

It's important to shoot variations of the hook specifically, not the entire video: the first three seconds drive most of the result, and they're the cheapest to vary.

Testing

All videos go into buying simultaneously, with equal budget per video. This is critical: if you allocate budget "by gut feeling," you'll test your expectations, not the audience.

Out of forty videos, typically eight deliver a cost per action below target, ten land near it, and the rest are noticeably worse. Budget then shifts to the eight, while another twenty stay in reserve for rotation when the top performers burn out.

When a batch ages

The library isn't permanent. Packaging changes, a new model launches, a season arrives. We plan for a four-to-six-month lifespan and schedule the next shoot before the current batch burns out — to avoid ending up back at square one with two weeks of downtime.

What stays with the client

Source files and rights. This isn't a formality: half the value of the library is that six months later you can reassemble new edits from the same source footage for a new platform or a new market, without reshooting.