I've watched dozens of Shopify stores burn ad budget on videos that look like commercials. Here's the thing: people don't want a commercial in their feed — they want a video that looks like a friend just found something cool.

The fix is almost always the first 3 seconds. Every high-performing UGC ad I've built follows one of these openers:

• A problem stated bluntly ("I used to hate doing X until...")

• A visual pattern interrupt (unboxing, reveal, before/after)

• A direct callout ("If you have [specific problem], watch this")

Skip the polished intro, skip the logo animation, skip the music swell. The algorithm and the viewer both punish anything that smells like an ad in the first beat.

If you're running your own UGC or briefing creators, test your hook against those three patterns before you touch the rest of the script. It's the highest-leverage 3 seconds in the whole video.