How to Build a UGC Creator Network from Competitor Ads
Find UGC creators by reading the credit in a competitor's own ad copy, then the runtime behind it. Six creators, 1,146 days live, and the disclosed spend.
Most advice about sourcing UGC creators ends at "look at what your competitors are running". That is where it stops being useful, because a competitor's ad does not come with a receipt.
It sometimes comes with a credit. A large share of home, lifestyle and sports brands put the creator's handle straight into the ad copy, because the licence they bought requires it or because the credit is part of the format. Once you have the handle, the ad itself tells you the rest: how long the brand has kept paying for it, how it ranks against everything else that brand runs, and what part of the budget had to be disclosed.
The six ads below all credit a named creator in their own copy. Between them they have been live for 1,146 days and disclosed €120.4k of EU and UK spend, and every one opens in the app.
The six creator-credited ads
Ordered by worldwide rank, best first.
| # | Creator | Brand | Rank | Days | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @thegrey_house_sparkles | Blinds-2go | Top 1% of 268 | 108 | €34.5k |
| 2 | @stephenwarnock3 | Golfclubs4cash | Top 6% of 348 | 389 | €22.7k |
| 3 | @stephenwarnock3 and two others | Golfclubs4cash | Top 7% of 348 | 367 | €17.8k |
| 4 | @myhomeinspo | Blinds-2go | Top 11% of 258 | 100 | €19.9k |
| 5 | @our_midfordhome87 | Blinds-2go | Top 14% of 258 | 122 | €10.4k |
| 6 | @lucyattheoldshop | Blinds-2go | Top 14% of 258 | 60 | €15.1k |
How to read the numbers
The rank is worldwide, the money is not. "Top 1% of 268 active ads" is computed across everything that brand runs in every market. The euro figure beside it is only the slice EU and UK disclosure rules force advertisers to publish. A creator's ad can be the single best thing a brand runs and still show a modest euro number, so read the rank first.
Days active is the brand voting with its budget. Nobody keeps paying to run a video for 389 days by accident. Runtime is the closest thing to a performance metric that a public ad library will ever give you, and it is the one number a creator marketplace cannot show you at all.
The rank denominators differ because the records do. Four of these ads sit on the blinds-2go.co.uk brand record with 258 active ads, and the @thegrey_house_sparkles ad sits on the retailer's separate shop subdomain record with 268. Same retailer, two entries in the index, so the two ads are ranked against slightly different pools.
This works where credits exist, and not everywhere. It is a convention in home, interiors, golf and lifestyle, and it is rare in supplements and beauty, where the same creator footage usually runs with no attribution at all. Where there is no credit you still get the runtime and the rank, you just do not get the name.
1. @thegrey_house_sparkles
This is the strongest signal in the set. The ad is ranked Top 1% of 268 active ads, has been live 108 days, exists in three versions, and carries €34.5k of disclosed EU and UK spend. Its copy is four words and a credit: "Elegant, timeless, and surprisingly easy to fit. Our no drill shutters are a game changer." then 📷: @thegrey_house_sparkles.
Three versions of one creator's footage is the tell worth learning. A brand that liked a video runs it. A brand that has found something re-cuts it and runs the cuts in parallel, which is what the ×3 means here. If you are deciding which creator to approach first, the one whose work a competitor has bothered to re-edit is a better bet than the one with more followers.
Find the ads already working in your niche
2. @stephenwarnock3
389 days. That is the number that should change how you value a creator. This ad has been running for over a year, sits in the Top 6% of 348 active ads, and has disclosed €22.7k.
The app also reads the ad's positioning: awareness stage "Unaware", desire "Improve Skills", persona "Men". That is the brief, reverse-engineered from a competitor's best-performing creative, and it is more useful than the creator's rate card. You are not trying to hire this person. You are trying to learn what the format has to do.
3. @stephenwarnock3 and two others
The same brand, a second long-runner at 367 days and Top 7% of 348, this time crediting three handles: @stephenwarnock3 again, plus @johnruddy.86 and @fabianschaer_official.
One creator appearing on two separate ads that have each run more than a year is the repeat-booking signal the old advice is reaching for when it says "look for creators working with multiple brands". You do not need multiple brands. One brand renewing the same person twice, and keeping both ads live simultaneously, says the same thing with far less inference.
Check what a competitor has kept running the longest
4. @myhomeinspo
Top 11% of 258 active ads, 100 days, two versions, €19.9k disclosed. A second creator on the same brand, ranking well, running for over three months.
This is what a working roster looks like from the outside. Blinds-2go is not betting on one person. It has at least four credited creators live at once, at different rank bands, which tells you the brand treats creators as a portfolio rather than a search for one hero.
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The longest-running of the Blinds-2go four at 122 days, ranked Top 14% of 258, three versions, €10.4k disclosed.
Its brand card is the other half of the picture: Blinds-2go has 258 live Meta ads out of 1.7k run in total, and its markets read 100% United Kingdom. A brand running entirely in one disclosed market is the rare case where the euro figure is close to the whole story rather than a fraction of it, which makes these six spend numbers unusually comparable to each other.
6. @lucyattheoldshop
The newest of the set at 60 days, ranked Top 14% of 258, and the most re-cut of all six at five versions against €15.1k of disclosed spend.
Five versions in sixty days is a brand testing hard rather than a brand coasting. Read against the 122-day ad above at the same rank, it is the difference between a creator being scaled and a creator being worked out, and you can only see it because the version count and the runtime sit next to each other.
The lines the whole account repeats
Step back from the individual creators and the Hooks view shows the account's script: 14 opening lines across 29 of the ads scanned, plus 20 catalog ads where Meta fills the text in per product. The top line, "Ready to make your home feel more like you?", runs 6 ads. "Regulate your room's temperature!" runs 4. "Transform your windows in minutes." runs 3.
That is the brief you hand a creator. Not "make a video about blinds", but the three openings this market has already paid to repeat, with the number of times each was worth repeating.
Pull the opening lines a competitor keeps reusing
What this does not do
It does not give you contact details, rates, or a creator's own performance history across brands. Nothing here scrapes a creator profile, and there is no export that produces a list of names, because the name only exists where the advertiser chose to publish it in the copy.
It also does not work on TikTok the way the rest of this site's ad data does. TikTok ads in the index carry organic engagement signals, not a rank badge and not disclosed spend, so the runtime-and-rank read above is a Meta technique. Anyone promising you TikTok ad spend per creator is describing something that is not published anywhere. The signals that do exist there are engagement benchmarks, and vetting a TikTok creator against measured benchmarks is a different job from this one.
What you get instead is the part that is actually hard to fake: which creative a competitor has paid to keep alive, for how long, how it ranks against their whole account, and whose name is on it.
Method
The six ads came from one query against the Meta ad index, filtered to Shopify DTC brands doing over $2M a month with more than 800,000 monthly visits, video only, still active, sorted by total active time and by scaler. Liveness has two guards rather than one, because status on its own lies: the ad has to be active at the source AND have an end_date within 10 days of the index date.
From the live results, the six here are the ones whose creative copy contains a creator handle, checked with a plain expression against the title and description rather than by eye.
Every rank, day count, version count and euro figure in this article was read off the screenshot beside it, not off the API. Those two disagree: the API's start and end dates put the top ad at 99 days while the app's own card says 108, and the disclosed spend moved between the first and second pull on the same afternoon because the index updates daily. Where they conflict, the number in the picture is the one published.
The API and MCP
This is the query that produced the candidate set:
curl -H "X-API-Key: $BRANDSEARCH_API_KEY" \
"https://api.brandsearch.co/v1/meta-ads/search?platform=shopify&brand_type=dtc%20brand\
&min_revenue_min=2000000&monthly_visits_min=800000&is_video=true&status=active\
&sort_by=total_active_time&sort_order=desc&spend_min=10000&page_size=100"
Each row returns start_date, end_date, status, eu_total_reach, eu_total_spend, funnel_type and the creative's own title and description, which is where the credit lives. Filter that last field for an @ and you have the list above.
The same index runs over MCP, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini and Copilot can query it in words instead of parameters. Get a key and run this query yourself.
FAQ
How do I find UGC creators my competitors already use?
Search their live Meta video ads and read the creative copy. Where a brand licences creator footage it very often credits the handle in the caption, which is the only place the name is reliably published.
Is a creator with more followers a safer bet?
Follower count is not in any of the six numbers above and it is not what the brands here are paying for. Runtime, rank and version count are all observable and all closer to the thing you care about.
Can I see how much a brand paid a specific creator?
No. The euro figures are the EU and UK disclosed slice of the ad's media spend, not the creator's fee, and nothing public reports what a creator was paid.
Does this work for TikTok creators?
Not in the same way. TikTok ads in the index carry organic engagement signals rather than a rank badge or disclosed spend, so you can see the content but not the runtime-and-rank read this article is built on.
What if the ads in my niche have no credits?
You lose the name and keep everything else. The rank, the days active, the version count and the hooks are all there whether or not the advertiser chose to credit anyone.
