Poke, a $27 million-backed AI assistant built into iMessage, shut down its user-generated content (UGC) program in early 2026 after three months and five million views without a measurable return. Two months later, U.S.-based creator marketing agency byNAME took over with 12 creators and a different content approach. The campaign generated 100 million views over 12 weeks. 

byNAME’s mandate was to recover the audience attention competitors had captured while Poke’s own program was generating views without results. Zachary Usac, a full-time UGC creator who reports more than 150 million organic views across brand campaigns, joined as byNAME’s Head of UGC and ran the campaign’s content operations.

“UGC is the perfect puzzle piece when it comes to top-of-funnel awareness,” says Seve Silvestre, co-founder of byNAME. “But awareness makes no sense if you’re not doing anything with it.” byNAME’s model pairs high-volume UGC with targeted influencer partnerships, then advises which creatives the client’s team should put paid spend behind. Poke had only the first layer, and byNAME’s diagnosis was that the format was wrong too. 

Text-Over-B-Roll Is No Longer a Content Strategy

Poke’s original UGC program used what byNAME calls “text-over-B-roll”: short clips overlaid with paragraph-length captions, requiring no original narrative and minimal creator effort. The format had become common across consumer tech UGC by early 2026. Poke ran it for three months, accumulated 5 million views, and shut the program down when the founders saw no meaningful backend results.

The entry point for byNAME came through LIFE MP, the agency’s sister talent management firm, whose roster included creator Fred Liu, who had become Poke’s Creator Marketing Lead. Several competing AI assistants were running high-volume UGC programs at the time and capturing more audience attention than Poke despite raising considerably less capital. The brief was to recapture mindshare.

byNAME’s replacement format required 30-to-60-second videos built around a specific viewer insight, with the product integrated into an argument rather than demonstrated directly. Zak and his team sourced formats from Instagram and TikTok, targeting videos that have gone viral in categories outside the AI assistant niche, then adapted the structures without replicating them. “It’s a 30, 60 second long, thought-provoking video that even positions your brand in a very strong way,” Seve says. “A lot of brands that come to us are like, we don’t want to be like the other UGC slop tech and AI companies as well.”

More Creators Does Not Mean More Views

byNAME started the Poke program with five creators in month one, expanded to 12 in month two, and stopped there. “More creators does not mean more views,” Seve says, pointing to a separate byNAME engagement where 10 creators generated 60 million views in a single month as evidence.

Zak draws a comparison from programs he has observed in the market. A campaign running a standardized UGC format with 200 creators might generate approximately 30 million views over 90 days, he says, while the 12-creator Poke program reached 100 million over a comparable window. The difference, both say, is in how each creator is managed, not in the size of the roster.

The standard approach in high-volume programs involves putting creators into a shared channel with an identical brief. “You’ll go into these Discords, saying, ‘Here’s the brief. This is what you’re going to say. Just follow it step by step, word for word, copy verbatim,’” Zak says. “I’m a firm believer that every creator is different.” byNAME runs individual sessions with each creator to build what Zak calls an “ideal viewer persona,” the specific audience profile each creator is best positioned to reach based on their natural content strengths.

One creator with a psychology background produced content linking Poke’s daily use to habit formation and identity. Another, who leaned into relationship content, framed Poke as a texting companion. A creator who had never posted any content before joining in month two scaled to over 10,000 followers and several million views within 60 days, per Zak.

Creator Relationships as a Campaign Variable

When the roster expanded to 12 creators, byNAME divided them into two cohorts, Alpha and Bravo, each running its own calls and feedback loops. Large group calls, in Zak’s experience, push individual creators to the margins of the conversation and diffuse the accountability that drives consistent output. “It sounds so small when I’m saying it out loud,” Zak says, “but that made such a huge difference.”

Weekly check-ins accompanied the structural split. By the campaign’s final weeks, calls that had started with cameras off and limited engagement ran with full participation.

According to Zak, one creator in the first cohort spent the program’s initial 27 days averaging around 1,000 views per video, while every other creator had all already gone viral, one with 600,000 views and another with a million. On day 28, the 1,000-view creator posted a video that outperformed every existing piece in the campaign with a one-million-plus-view video, and then consistently generated between 100,000 and 500,000 views per video for the rest of the engagement. Three creators quit their full-time jobs during the campaign, Zak says, as inbound brand offers followed each creator’s visible track record. 

“Once you have a successful UGC account, the amount of eyes on you is insane,” he says. “The demand for really high-level UGC creators is so high because not a lot of people have cracked the code in terms of how to consistently go viral.”

The Influencer Layer UGC Alone Cannot Provide

byNAME ran a parallel influencer campaign with an objective of establishing Poke’s credibility in the tech and AI space rather than adding reach. “We work with those types of creators who can move their audience to present AI and Poke in a positive way,” Seve says.

Creator selection prioritized those who already used Poke daily. “Are you a power user already of Poke? Have you heard about it?” Seve says, describing the primary vetting question. The campaign also incorporated cinematic creators, storytellers capable of building an emotional narrative around an AI product rather than a feature demonstration. Seve cites Claude’s Influencer Marketing approach as an inspiration, noting its use of narrative-driven content to position AI as personally meaningful. “Really getting cinematic people to make stories around AI to make it more human,” he says.

A secondary goal was securing paid usage rights on the influencer content so high-performing material could extend into advertising beyond its organic window. Seve describes monitoring the paid ad libraries of the top tech/AI brands investing in creators to identify which creator content was being boosted, using that signal to inform which Poke partners justified the investment. The UGC program provided the volume. The influencer layer provided the differentiation.

What Poke’s Campaign Says About the Next Phase of Consumer Tech UGC 

The campaign formally closed on August 31, after Poke’s acquisition by Cognition. Even with no active creator posting, byNAME reports that existing content continued generating approximately a million organic views on active days through compounding. “We’re still getting like a million view days even with no creators posting,” Seve says, “because of that compounding effect.”

Seve draws a parallel to TikTok Shop, which moved from an open market to one where well-funded brands dominate. He expects the same compression in consumer tech UGC, where enterprise brands including Higgsfield and Replit are already competing for top UGC creators, with rates reaching $50 per video and, according to Zak, as high as $80 elsewhere. “If you’re not already establishing the framework of what your high-volume UGC campaign could look like, you’re really going to be behind,” he says. “Because what we saw with Influencer Marketing and TikTok Shop, it’s going to be seriously pay-to-play.”

For brands that have not started, Seve’s advice runs counter to the instinct to scale immediately. Start by making content from the company’s own accounts. Find the angle that performs. Then build from signal rather than from budget. “Just start it small,” he says. “It’s so easy to do from your own bedroom or your own office, and there’s a clear roadmap to do it.”

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