UGC marketing is becoming harder to spot—on purpose. UGC being used to promote products and brands in a “natural” setting is nothing new on social media, but it typically exists on a brand profile or is marked as an #ad on a creator’s account. Now, viewers are seeing more content that centers a product more slyly, like using an AI voice-to-text app without ever acknowledging its presence in a breakup text video. The Wall Street Journal calls this new trend in user-generated content “stealth marketing.” Brands are doing it intentionally; they know by now that young consumers especially are trusting smaller creators over mega-influencers who have clearly become millionaires off ads. By hiring dozens, or even hundreds, of micro-creators to make content on secondary accounts that all have identical hooks and no formal disclosure, they get content across the algorithm without having viewers put off by it feeling like an ad. Whether this abides by FTC advertising guidelines is murky water, but the creators and brands making reliable money from it seem to find it worth the risk. (WSJ)
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