Most Spanish brands budget UGC as a one off expense, burn it by March and spend the rest of the year asking for favours. A simple annual plan avoids that and costs one afternoon of work.

How the year splits

The Spanish retail calendar is not flat. January and July are sale seasons, November is Black Friday, December is Christmas and August almost stops. A realistic split loads the quarters before those peaks: Black Friday content gets filmed in September, not the week before, when every good creator is booked and charging more.

The lines a budget needs

Production per video, number of videos, hook variants, advertising rights, and a contingency line of around fifteen per cent. Contingency is not lazy accounting: it is what lets you answer a competitor or reshoot a video that worked, without opening an internal debate every time.

The line almost everyone forgets

Rights renewal. You buy twelve months of paid usage, the video is still performing a year later, and you discover you can no longer run it. Renewing costs a fraction of reshooting, but only if it was planned. Put expiry dates in the same calendar you keep campaigns in.

How much to set aside against revenue

There is no universal figure, but there is a logic: the creative budget should scale with ad spend, not with revenue. Double what you spend on ads while keeping the same number of videos and cost per result climbs through creative fatigue. You pay either way, just in media instead.

How to defend it internally

With the honest comparison: cost of a creator video against cost of a traditional shoot, and how many variants each one produces. What convinces a finance director is not creativity, it is cost per tested variant.

Keep reading

Plan your year with creators →

Frequently asked questions

When do I film Black Friday content?

In September.

Which line always gets forgotten?

Rights renewal.

How much contingency?

Around fifteen per cent.

Does the budget follow revenue?

No, it follows ad spend.