A UGC-style ad: a photoreal person holding your product and delivering a hook to camera, the kind of clip brands normally pay a creator four figures and wait weeks for. Claude is the layer you talk to. It writes and sharpens the creative brief, sends it through to Arcads, and Arcads does the actual video generation. Then you ask for variations and let the winner reveal itself instead of betting a budget on your first guess.
Both routes end in the same place: Claude can call Arcads directly. Choose based on where you already work.
Add Arcads as a custom connector once and generate ads from a normal chat. Nothing to install, no terminal. This is the one to pick if you have never opened Claude Code.
Install Arcads' official plugin, which brings the connection and four ready-made ad skills with it. Better if you want competitor research and hook cloning, not only generation.
https://mcp.arcads.ai. Save the connector.Arcads publishes an official plugin on GitHub at arcads-ai/skills. It bundles the same connection plus four skills, so this route gives you more than the connector alone.
/plugin marketplace add arcads-ai/skills and press enter. That points Claude Code at Arcads' official repo./plugin install arcads@arcads. The plugin ships its own MCP configuration, so installing it also wires up the Arcads connection for you./mcp, choose Arcads, and sign in. Once it shows as connected you can generate straight from the terminal.This is the step that separates ads that convert from generic AI filler, and it is the step almost everyone skips. The generator is not the bottleneck. The brief is. If you hand Claude "make me ten UGC ads for my product", you get ten versions of the same bland claim. If you hand it what your customers actually said about you, you get ten different angles, each one already proven to matter to somebody.
Go and copy your raw reviews first: product page reviews, App Store reviews, support tickets, DMs, the comments under your best-performing post. Fifteen is plenty. Then run this before you generate anything.
I am about to make a batch of UGC-style video ads for my product, and I want the hooks to come from real customer language rather than from you. I am pasting my actual reviews and comments below.
Read them and pull out the exact phrases people use when they describe the problem my product solved, in their words, not marketing words. Group them into distinct angles, where an angle is a different reason someone bought, and tell me roughly how often each angle showed up. For each angle, write one spoken opening line of no more than twelve words that a real person would say out loud to a friend, using the vocabulary from the reviews.
Give me the five strongest angles ranked by how often they appeared, and for each one note the specific review it came from so I can see the evidence. Do not invent an angle that is not in the source material, and if only two angles are genuinely supported, say so instead of padding the list to five.Once you have your angles, the whole thing happens in one conversation. Do it in this order.
Generate a photoreal person for a UGC ad and then put my real product in their hands. The person should be [age range, gender, energy, for example "mid-20s woman, warm and natural, not polished"] in a [setting, for example "normal home kitchen with soft daylight"].
I have attached my product photo. Keep the product exactly true to that image: same packaging, same label, same colours, same proportions. Do not redesign it, do not add text to it, and do not substitute a generic version of the category.
Before you generate, tell me in one line what you are about to make so I can correct you, since generating costs credits. Once I approve, produce the actor holding the product, framed so the product is clearly readable.Using the actor and product we just approved, create ten UGC-style video ads through Arcads, built from the five customer angles you found earlier, two ads per angle.
For each ad, write the spoken script yourself before generating: open on the customer's own phrasing for the problem, land the product as the fix in one natural sentence, and close on a single clear action. Keep every script under twenty seconds of speech, keep the tone unscripted and phone-shot rather than commercial, and keep the product visible in frame throughout. The only thing that should differ between the two ads in a pair is the opening line, so I can tell which hook did the work.
Show me all ten scripts as a numbered list first and wait for my approval before you send anything to Arcads. Then generate them, and when they are done give me a plain list of which finished video corresponds to which angle and hook, so I know what I am testing.If you took route B, these arrive with the plugin and run as slash commands. They are worth knowing about because they cover the research half of ad creative, not the generation half.
/arcads:spy-competitor-ads needs a browser automation connector active in Claude Code to read it. The other three skills work without one.Your first ad is almost never the winner, and that is normal rather than a failure. In paid ads the opening line does most of the work, so the smart move has always been to test several hooks against the same product and let the numbers pick. The reason people did not do this before is that each variation meant another shoot, another creator fee, another week. When a variation costs a sentence and a few minutes of render time, testing stops being a luxury and becomes the default. Make the batch, run it, keep the one that performs, and build the next batch off that winner.
https://mcp.arcads.ai.