As brands compete for credibility in the creator economy, user-generated content (UGC) has shifted from a social extra to a measurable performance engine. Yet, for many marketers, producing scalable, on-brand, and high-converting UGC remains a costly experiment. That operational gap is what Joseph Black and Oliver Jacobs set out to close with SHOUT, a creator performance agency and technology platform designed to industrialize the process behind human-made content.

Joseph and Oliver have built campaigns for brands including Amazon, Red Bull, Spotify, Adobe, and Warner Bros., earning recognition as TikTok’s verified UK agency partner.

The story began long before SHOUT existed, however. In 2016, while still at university, the pair launched UniTaskr, a platform that connected students with flexible paid work. The idea was simple: help young people earn money and gain experience while studying. What proved difficult was growth.

“For years, our biggest challenge wasn’t the product, it was growth,” Joseph recalls. “We tried everything to get students onto the platform – multiple agencies, different channels, big promises, and under-delivery. The real issue was that we never had enough content, or the right content, to test what resonated.”

One experiment changed everything. They posted a task on UniTaskr asking 50 students to “shout” about the app on social media. “We had zero aspiration to get into marketing,” Joseph says. “It was literally: let’s give some students some cash and see what happens.” Overnight, it went viral.

The pair realized they had stumbled on a structural advantage: hundreds of small creators with tight communities could outperform a single influencer at a fraction of the cost. “Smaller accounts with highly engaged audiences, lower cost per test, and the ability to run lots of variations at once – it just made sense,” Joseph explains. 

During the pandemic, that insight became a movement: UniTaskr grew from roughly 3,000 members to more than 250,000 users, even surpassing LinkedIn in daily sign-ups on some days.

Oliver saw the larger opportunity. “Brands loved the idea of nano creators and UGC, but they had no realistic way to organize hundreds of creators, briefs, approvals, rights, and reporting,” he says. “They wanted the outcome, but didn’t have the machinery. SHOUT became our answer to that.”

A Global Production Engine

SHOUT was officially spun out in 2019 as a dedicated UGC production company, combining agency services with a self-serve technology layer. 

Today, the company operates across three pillars: SHOUT Agency (runs creator performance campaigns for brands), UGC Studio (a self-service platform where marketers can brief, recruit, and manage creators directly), and Customer Advocacy Tools (activate a brand’s existing buyers as credible content voices).

“We’re not here to make ‘more content,’” Joseph says. “We’re here to make performance-ready UGC at scale, in a repeatable way.”

Their approach begins with an outcome-based strategy. “We always start with one thing: the outcome,” Joseph explains. “Are we driving acquisition, reactivation, education, upsell, or awareness? From there, we turn what most people call a ‘brief’ into a creative roadmap – how many hooks, what angles, what objection-busters. That roadmap drives casting, scripting frameworks, and production.”

Casting itself is treated like a data discipline. “We don’t start with follower count,” Oliver notes. “We start with fit, storytelling, execution, and reliability. A creator might look great on a deck, but if they can’t land a hook or handle objections naturally, they’re not right for performance UGC.”

Quality control, meanwhile, runs like a production line. Every asset passes through four gates – creative, brand and compliance, technical, and performance-readiness checks – before entering the client library. 

“If it doesn’t pass, it’s either revised or rejected,” Joseph says. “Over time, those QA (quality assurance) learnings feed back into our templates and AI models, so our creators get clearer guidance and our error rate drops.”

To handle speed and scale, SHOUT built an internal system of template libraries, AI-assisted casting, and automated QA workflows. “Speed only works if your system is robust,” Joseph says. “We’ve built the infrastructure that lets us run campaigns with hundreds of creators without descending into chaos.”

Why Most Brand UGC Fails

Both founders agree that many marketers still misunderstand what makes UGC work. 

“UGC production inside most brands was organized chaos,” Oliver says. “You’d see teams using marketplaces or influencer platforms, pushing out generic briefs, then getting flooded with content that didn’t fit: wrong tone, off-brand, or low quality.”

He points to recurring misconceptions: brands assuming UGC is cheap and easy, or that tools alone solve creative problems. “They thought they were buying a shortcut and ended up creating more work for themselves,” Oliver adds.

The bigger issue, according to Joseph, is that brands often underestimate what happens after products ship. “They dramatically underestimate everything that happens after they send the product out – creator questions, consistent feedback, brand safety, compliance, asset organization, licensing,” he explains. “At a small scale, you can brute-force it. At hundreds of assets per month, it becomes an entire operation.”

In short, most marketers still treat UGC as an afterthought. “They treat it like a side quest, not its own discipline,” Oliver notes. “UGC isn’t some extra social content – it’s an operationally heavy craft that sits at the intersection of creative, media, and community. If you don’t resource it like that, it will fail.”

The Anatomy of High-Converting UGC

Contrary to popular belief, effective UGC isn’t defined by how “lo-fi” it looks, according to Joseph and Oliver. 

“A lot of people still think UGC is about the look: vertical, handheld, slightly rough,” Oliver says. “That gives you something that looks ‘UGC-ish,’ but not necessarily something that performs.”

High-converting UGC, he explains, follows a structure: “Underneath the casual aesthetic, you’ll find a strong hook, a clear problem or tension, demonstration, proof, and a specific, compelling CTA. The best UGC is performance storytelling disguised as something your friend might have posted.”

That distinction has proven measurable. In one early campaign for a consumer app, SHOUT cut the client’s cost per install from $10-$20 to under $2, more than doubling the guaranteed number of downloads within a month. “Our UGC pipeline became the backbone of their performance marketing,” Joseph says. “That’s when it clicked; this wasn’t a ‘UGC add-on’ to someone else’s campaign. It was the campaign.”

AI as an Enabler

With AI now reshaping creative production, SHOUT’s stance is pragmatic. 

“AI should augment human creativity, not replace it,” Oliver emphasizes. “If you give AI the repetitive, data-heavy work, you free up your team and creators to focus on judgment, empathy, and originality.”

In SHOUT’s workflow, AI assists with creator casting, brief generation, content tagging, and performance analysis. “It helps us match creators to briefs, check for key elements, and spot patterns in winning creatives faster than any human analyst could,” Oliver explains.

But replacing creators with synthetic avatars, Joseph warns, risks eroding trust. “The entire power of UGC is that it’s rooted in real people with real experiences,” he says. “AI can generate faces and voices, but it can’t genuinely talk about how a product fits into someone’s life. If you strip out the human layer, you strip out trust, and in performance marketing, trust is what turns attention into action.”

What’s Next for SHOUT

The next 12 months are about scale and modularity for SHOUT. 

“We’re evolving UGC Studio so brands can run more of their workflow in a self-serve way with our infrastructure behind it,” Oliver says. “We’re also deepening AI-driven casting and QA and building more vertical-specific frameworks – beauty versus fintech versus QSR – packaged into repeatable playbooks.”

In the long run, both founders see SHOUT becoming an invisible backbone of global performance creative. 

“Traditional production isn’t going away,” Joseph says, “but it can’t keep up with the volume and variation modern paid media demands. Every platform, audience, and offer needs constant testing and refreshing. That’s where we come in, producing, testing, and scaling high-converting UGC at a pace traditional models can’t match.”

Oliver frames the future of the UGC economy as both an opportunity and a warning. “What excites me is how thin the line between brand and audience is becoming,” he says. “UGC turns customers, fans, and communities into the creative department. But the temptation to cut corners, to over-automate or treat creators as interchangeable could undermine the trust that makes UGC powerful in the first place.”

Joseph agrees. “The brands that win will be the ones who invest in the unsexy stuff: infrastructure, relationships, and creative discipline,” he says. “Our job at SHOUT is to give them an engine that can handle the scale and complexity so they can focus on strategy and brand.”

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