Making AI UGC product ads with a fictional character

UGC style ads work because they don’t look like ads. A person holds a product up to a phone camera, says one honest-sounding line, and the viewer keeps watching. Hiring creators for every test is slow and expensive, so a lot of small brands and freelancers now make these with AI.

This is also where AI video gets misused the most. So this guide does two things: it gives you a working recipe, and it is strict about one rule. Every piece of media in the ad must be yours or fictional. A fictional character, a product you own or have been hired to promote, a driving clip you filmed or generated, and audio you have a license for. No real people, no downloaded creator footage, no other brands’ packaging.

The sample ad in the AI Character Kit took about 15 minutes end to end. Here is how it was made.

What does a fully owned AI ad look like?

Every element should pass the “could I show the source file?” test:

Element	Owned option	Not okay
Character	A fictional person you generated	A celebrity, influencer or anyone you know
Product	Your product, a client’s product, or a made-up brand for tests	Another company’s logo or packaging
Driving video	You on your phone, or a generated driver	A creator’s TikTok or Reel
Voice	Your own voiceover or a licensed TTS voice	A cloned voice of a real person
Music	A track from the platform’s library when posting, or one you licensed	A popular song ripped from YouTube

In the kit’s demo, the character (Seo-yeon), the driver (Mia) and the product (BERRY GLOW strawberry sugar mask) are all fictional and AI-generated. Mia was made with workflows 01 and 03, so no real person’s performance was used at all.

Step 1: How do you make the character with the product? (about 30 seconds)

Products are far more reliable when they are in the reference image from the start. Write the product straight into the character prompt:

candid phone photo of Seo-yeon, a 22-year-old Korean woman with long straight
black hair tied half-up with a red ribbon, soft natural makeup, wearing a
traditional hanbok with a pastel pink jeogori jacket and deep red skirt, holding a
giant pink tub of BERRY GLOW strawberry sugar mask next to her face, label facing
the camera, natural skin texture, soft daylight

Krea 2 Turbo at 8 steps, CFG 1, euler / simple and 896 x 1344 takes about 32 seconds on a 3090 Ti. Run it a few times and pick the image where the label is clean and the face is clear.

If you are making ads for a real client, use their actual product photo as a reference and get their written approval for the final ad. Testing with made-up brands like BERRY GLOW, DEW LAB or VOLT ZERO keeps you safe while you learn.

Step 2: How do you get a driving clip? (about 3 minutes)

The driver supplies the performance: the head tilts, the hand gestures, the mouth movement. Two options:

Film yourself. Prop your phone up, hold anything about the same size and shape as the product (a tub for a tub, a can for a can), and talk to the camera for 5 seconds. You don’t need to look like the character. Your movement is all that is used.

Generate it. Make a second fictional person holding a similar object with an image model, then animate them with Wan 2.2 image to video using a prompt like:

She holds the phone and talks to the camera, small head movements, blinking
naturally, vlog style

Trim to 5 seconds at 16 fps for your first tests.

Step 3: How do you run the swap? (about 3 minutes)

Load the character image and the driver into Wan Animate 2. Describe the character’s looks and the product in the character prompt, and the motion in the action prompt:

A woman talking to the camera while holding up a giant tub of strawberry face
mask, expressive face and hand gestures, handheld phone video

The settings (6 steps, lcm, CFG 1, 480 x 848, LightX2V distill LoRA) and the full troubleshooting list are in the Wan Animate 2 character swap guide. The single most important rule: name the product in the prompt and make sure it is already in the character image. Otherwise it melts into a blob.

Step 4: How do you upscale for TikTok?

The swap comes out at 480p. Upscale to 1080 x 1920 in CapCut, or use ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i swap.mp4 -vf "scale=1080:1920:flags=lanczos" -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -c:a copy swap_1080.mp4

Step 5: What captions work?

UGC captions are big, simple and fast:

• Big white bold text with a black outline
• 3 to 6 words per card
• A new card every second or so
• Placed in the lower middle, clear of the platform’s buttons

Hook lines that tend to hold attention in the first second:

• “I have one thing to say…”
• “Nobody talks about this…”
• “POV: you finally found it”
• “Stop scrolling if your skin…”
• “This is your sign to…”

If you prefer the command line, ffmpeg’s drawtext filter can burn captions in:

ffmpeg -i swap.mp4 -vf "scale=1080:1920,drawtext=fontfile=Poppins-Black.ttf:text='GIANT skincare hits different':fontsize=72:fontcolor=white:borderw=6:bordercolor=black:x=(w-tw)/2:y=h*0.72:enable='between(t,1,3)'" -c:a copy ad.mp4

Step 6: What about sound?

Lip movement follows the driver. If you filmed yourself, put your own audio back on and it stays in sync. Otherwise use a voiceover you recorded, a TTS voice whose license covers ads, or pick a sound inside the platform’s own library when you post. Do not clone a real person’s voice.

Step 7: Should you label it as AI?

Yes. TikTok and Instagram both ask you to mark AI-generated content, and they can remove videos that skip it. Turn on the AI label when you post. Being upfront also protects your client: an ad that feels like a real customer review but quietly isn’t can run into advertising rules in many countries. A fictional, labelled character is a creative choice. A fake testimonial is a problem.

What makes these ads look real?

• Small, natural movements. Talking and gesturing beat dancing and spinning.
• Everyday settings. A bedroom, a bathroom mirror, a car seat. Mess sells realism.
• Phone camera language. “Handheld phone video”, slight shake, front camera framing.
• Real skin. In the character prompt, ask for “natural skin texture with visible pores” and avoid “flawless” or “8k”.
• One product, one message. A 5 to 15 second ad has room for one claim.

How do you make a series instead of one ad?

Keep one base image of your character and build every new scene from it with an image editor. That way the same face shows up in the bathroom, the gym and the car, which is what makes a recurring “creator” believable. The method is in how to keep the same face without LoRA training.

No 24 GB GPU? The whole recipe runs on a rented card for well under a dollar of GPU time. See running ComfyUI on Vast.ai cheaply.

The AI Character Kit includes the four workflows used for the sample ad, product prompts with fictional brands, and the full ad recipe in the PDF guide.