UGC at
altitude.
A New York F-35 flight simulator with two radically different buyer types. One UGC-led strategy that cut acquisition costs by 63% across both.
The product had a clear market and growing demand. What it didn't have was a strategy that recognised its two buyers as the distinct audiences they actually are.
The Squadron is the world's largest F-35 flight simulator center, located at 7 World Trade Center in New York City. The experience is part thrill ride, part leadership methodology: guests suit up, receive a briefing from real combat pilots, fly missions in state-of-the-art simulators, and debrief using Air Force-grade techniques.
Corporate clients including Meta, PwC, and Amazon send their teams here for an immersive workshop that borrows its framework from pilot training. Individual consumers come for the rush of flying a fighter jet for an afternoon.
The snapshot,
up front.
Two funnels, separated
Built two separate paid media funnels that stopped cannibalizing each other and started producing independently trackable, goal-measured results.
UGC beat brand 7 to 1
Deployed a UGC program featuring real people in real cockpits that outperformed brand creative by 7× on purchases in direct head-to-head testing.
Costs cut by 63%
Cut B2C purchase CPA and B2B lead CPL by approximately 63% compared to the prior agency's benchmarks.
Six for six
Exceeded all six monthly performance goals in March 2026, with Workshop CPL coming in 57% below the agreed target.
Strong product,
mistaken strategy.
Put a camera on someone flying an F-35 simulator and the product sells itself. The problem was the strategic layer sitting between the product and the customer.
No Separation Between B2C and B2B
One buyer books a birthday adventure. The other justifies a team-building line item to finance, then moves twenty people. One funnel blended two incompatible signals into one incoherent lookalike.
CPA and CPL Running at Double
No funnel separation, no audience targeting, no creative strategy — and purchase CPAs and lead CPLs roughly twice what a well-structured account should return.
No UGC, No Social Proof
The prior creative showed the cockpit, the simulator, the facility. It never showed a human having the experience — the biggest miss available on a product this visceral.
The prior agency spent the budget. It left growth on the table.
Instagram · @thesquadronnycOpen on Instagram ↗
Prove it works,
or move on.
Split B2C and B2B into separate funnels, each with its own goals and thresholds
Bring B2C purchase CPA and B2B lead CPL well under the prior agency's benchmarks
Build a UGC program that produces scalable, platform-ready performance assets
Report to monthly goal dashboards both sides agree to in advance
Instagram · @thesquadronnycOpen on Instagram ↗
Cracking the code.
The Squadron was never one campaign with a blurry audience. It was two businesses sharing one product, each needing its own infrastructure.
UGC as Performance Creative
Real people in real cockpits. That was the brief. An overproduced ad tells you a product looks cool. A person grinning while gripping a flight stick tells you it feels cool.
Instagram · @thesquadronnycOpen on Instagram ↗
Two Funnels, One Cockpit
B2C was built around the thrill, B2B around the methodology. Separating them let each be optimised on its own signal instead of an average of both.
Goals as the Operating System
Every decision anchored to a pre-agreed monthly target with a defined threshold. Hitting them stopped being an event and became the default outcome.
Instagram · @thesquadronnycOpen on Instagram ↗
Instagram · @thesquadronnycOpen on Instagram ↗
The camera
never lies.
UGC didn't just outperform brand creative. It outperformed it by 7× on purchases in the same month, on the same platform, with the same budget.
Creator “Caro” alone drove 31 purchases in a single month at a 2.21% link CTR and 1,676 post reactions. The non-UGC campaigns, running simultaneously, produced 8 purchases total. The product is a human experience. The only creative that could represent it accurately was a human having the experience.
Two buyers,
two runways.
B2C and B2B buyers arrive at the same physical experience through completely different roads. Each funnel got its own creative, its own channels, and its own goals.
The thrill
- Meta account restructured around three campaign objectives: awareness, traffic, and conversion
- UGC creative anchored the conversion campaigns, with evergreen content running alongside seasonal and promotional variants
- Facebook delivered 34 of the 58 UGC-attributed purchases; Instagram delivered the remaining 24
- The 35–54 age segment produced the highest purchase volume
- Budget managed to a hard daily cap with rules-based automation to prevent overspend
The methodology
- Workshop campaign structured as a two-step funnel: awareness first with a soft CTA, then retargeting warm audiences with a direct conversion message
- Letting the awareness layer build before pushing the conversion message reduced CPL significantly
- By March 2026, Workshop Meta campaigns delivered 48 leads at an $85.34 CPL against a $200 target
- Google Search drove Team Building volume across branded, non-branded, and Performance Max structures
- Geographic targeting refined to the New York metro area, where the physical location creates natural relevance
The systems
underneath.
UGC Production Program
Noetic built a repeatable UGC content pipeline from the ground up.
- Briefs developed separately for B2C and B2B use cases, each with its own creative direction, hooks, and scene breakdown
- Creators scouted, contracted, and briefed by the Noetic team
- Shoots took place at The Squadron's 7 World Trade Center facility
- Content produced across 9:16, 4:5 and 1:1 to cover every ad placement on Meta
- All assets tracked at the creator level and rotated based on performance data
Paid Search: Team Building
- Non-branded Search targeted high-intent queries: “team building NYC,” “corporate workshops New York,” “unique team outing ideas”
- Top March keywords: “nyc team building activities” (6 conversions), “unique group activities nyc” (4.17), “fun team building activities nyc” (3)
- Branded, non-branded and Performance Max structures run in parallel
Landing Pages
- A dedicated Workshops landing page built and launched at thesquadron.com/workshops in January 2026
- Scoped specifically for the B2B Workshop funnel, with copy and imagery calibrated to the corporate buyer
- Pixel integration implemented to feed conversion data back into Meta's optimization algorithm, closing the attribution loop
Attribution and Reporting
- Monthly Agency Analytics dashboards configured with goal thresholds for every key metric across both funnels
- A shared dashboard that required no interpretation: every number had a target sitting next to it
- Underperformance surfaced immediately; strong pacing gave the team confidence to increase budgets mid-cycle
Real pilots. Real guests.
Real results.
The concepts that carried the campaign, split across both funnels and exported from the Figma ad library. The creator reels above ran alongside them.
Every goal,
beaten.
March 2026. Each target was agreed in advance with a defined threshold — the marker on each track is the goal, the bar is what landed.
Six for six is not luck. It is a calibrated system — and mid-engagement the client raised the daily B2B budget from $500 to $700 unprompted on the back of it.
The gear behind it.
Meta Ads
Google Ads
Shopify
Agency Analytics
Asana
Figma
Salesforce
GA4
March 2026,
a representative month.
Since October 2025, The Squadron's paid performance has improved across every tracked metric.
lower acquisition costs vs. the prior agency, across both funnels. The product had been undersold, not because demand was weak, but because the infrastructure was wrong.
more purchases from UGC creative vs. non-UGC on the same platform, same month, same budget. Creator “Caro” alone drove 31 purchases, 1,676 post reactions, and a 2.21% link CTR.
B2B leads in a single month: 70 Team Building leads (25% above goal) and 48 Workshop leads (23% above goal). Workshop CPL at $85.34 against a $200 target.
monthly goals exceeded: B2C purchases (14% above), Team Building leads (25%), Workshop leads (23%), Workshop CPL (57% better), B2C CPA (13% better), Team Building CPA (23% better).
“We came to Noetic after a frustrating experience where budget was spent and results never followed. They restructured everything from the ground up: two separate funnels, a real UGC program, and actual targets we could hold each other to. The numbers speak for themselves.”
The team behind the flight.
UGC doesn't fail experiential brands because the format is wrong. It fails when the brief is lazy, the creators are mismatched, or the product hasn't been thought through from the guest's perspective.
When UGC is built around authentic human moments, paired with a funnel structure that speaks specifically to each buyer type, and measured against goals that both sides agree to in advance, it becomes the most efficient creative vehicle available.
The Squadron's product is the proof. The cockpit sells itself. The camera just needs to be there.
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