Blog
Tips, guides and stories about UGC and creator marketing.
The only vertical where a good video can hurt someone
Private clinics buy a lot of video in Portugal, much of it aimed at patients abroad. Almost every brief starts from the wrong thing: the result.
Doing UGC in Portugal Without Followers
The brand buys a video, not an audience. What replaces followers, and what a small market like Portugal changes at the start.
Landing Your First UGC Clients in Portugal
The three channels that work here, the message that gets a reply, and what to have ready before writing to the first brand.
Which Platforms Matter for UGC in Portugal
You do not choose where the video runs, the brand does. What each destination demands of the shoot and of the edit.
The second one is never as good, and it is not the creator
A video outperforms everything else, so you ask for five more like it. What made it work is usually not the part you can see.
You are hearing a flaw nobody else can hear
The urge to buy a camera usually arrives when the real problem is something else. What clients notice is a short list, and none of it is your sensor.
The video is yours, the comment section is not
You paid for the video, it runs on somebody else’s account, and that is where your product gets judged. Decide who answers before you publish, not after.
You own four hundred videos and can use maybe sixty
Two years of commissioning leaves a folder nobody can audit. The expensive part is not storage, it is buying again what you already have.
Your competitor is not the other installer
In renovation the customer is not choosing between two firms. They are choosing between doing it and waiting another year, and that changes what content has to do.
The subject of your video cannot read the brief
Every other shoot has a person who can be asked to do it again. Here the main performer is a dog who has decided the session is over, and the clock is yours.
Your client marks your exams
Student ambassador work is the one job where the brand also grades you, houses you and sometimes sponsors your visa. That changes what you can safely agree to.
Here the approval comes first, not last
Every other client approves your edit. A drinks brand approves your script, before anything is filmed, and a creator who discovers that late loses a day.
The only video you make that has a death date
A property video dies the day the property sells, and everyone knows that when it is filmed. Price it that way, or sell the thing that survives instead.
It was live for three days, then it was gone
A marketplace pulled your video and the notice explained nothing. It is almost never the quality. It is something the video says.
You switched to Dutch to be polite, and that is the wrong document
A Flemish client, so you send the invoice in Dutch. Good instinct, wrong object: the language of your paperwork follows where you are established.
Nobody chose to watch it, and nobody can hear it
A brand wants your video on the screen in their shop. Three things are true there that are false everywhere else, and they change the edit.
Somebody donated the money that is paying you
A stranger gave twenty pounds, and a fraction of it becomes your fee. That single fact changes the film, the quote and what you can be asked to shoot.
The buyer nobody in your niche is emailing
Regional agencies, tourism offices, federations and intercommunal bodies commission a lot of video. Almost no creator approaches them, and the reason is fixable.
The same serum, two shoppers, one campaign that works
In Portugal a skincare brand reaches the same person through two routes that behave nothing alike. The content that sells at the pharmacy counter fails on a shelf.
The campaign runs six weeks. The video does not.
A brief asks for your child and the fee is good. The decision is not about the fee, it is about a person who could not be asked and will one day have a view.
Your hands, in an ad you never shot
Eight months later the footage is still working, with someone else’s voice over it, in a language you do not speak. Nobody broke anything. You sent the raw files.
The number that matters is not the amount
It is the age. What works on an invoice three weeks old fails at ten weeks, and in Portugal the delay can cost more than the delay itself.
Someone in a uniform is walking towards you
Filming in a shop is not a legal question, it is a property question. Who owns the ground you are standing on decides, and the brief never says who that is.
The advice stops right before the useful part
Do not quietly outsource the language you do not speak. Correct, and incomplete. Working openly in a pair is the answer, and the whole difficulty is administrative.