We’ve been experimenting with scaling UGC playbooks across Russia and the US for the past year, and honestly, it’s messier than I expected. The pattern I keep seeing is: we’ll nail a UGC template in one market, get excited about replicating it in the other, and then it just… doesn’t land the same way.
Last quarter, we had a really successful series of lifestyle product demos in the US market—short, snappy, straight-to-the-point. We adapted the brief for Russian creators, kept the core messaging, and expected 80% of the performance. We got maybe 40%.
I think part of it is cultural content preferences. US audiences seem to respond well to fast cuts and minimal editing. The Russian market I’ve worked with tends to appreciate slightly more polished, narrative-driven content. But there’s got to be more to it than just aesthetics, right?
What’s your actual experience been? When you’ve tried to scale UGC templates across two markets, where did it fall apart? Was it the creative brief itself, the creator mindset, audience expectations, or something completely different? And more importantly—did you find a way to make it work, or do you basically have to build separate playbooks for each market?