Meta: Partnership Ads Reduce Conversion Costs by 45% in EMEA

Have you ever felt like you are pouring money into ads without being able to prove their true effectiveness? That is the shared pain of thousands of marketers worldwide, especially when it comes to advertising with content creators.

For years, creator marketing was viewed as the "stepchild" of media budgets. It was appealing in terms of creativity, but vague in terms of measurement. Chief Financial Officers looked at quarterly reports and asked: "What are we getting back?" And the answer was often just vague numbers about views, engagement, and "vanity" metrics that anyone could read but no one truly believed.

Things are changing. Meta has just published a 54-page report titled "Together creates better: building for a creator-first future", presenting startling figures on the real effectiveness of Meta Partnership Ads – an ad format that allows brands to run ads from a creator's account. And the most shocking figure: conversion costs drop by 45% when at least 30% of the assets in a campaign are partnership ads.

Join me, SilverZ, with 20 years of witnessing countless "grand reports" that ultimately amounted to empty promises, to analyze whether Meta is truly bringing something different this time – and whether Vietnamese marketers should care.

What does the report say? Numbers you cannot ignore

Meta's report focuses on a core paradox: creator marketing has superior long-term effectiveness but is undervalued in the short term. Data from the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) shows that creators achieve a short-term ROI index of 99 compared to an industry average of 100 – meaning they are just on par. But in the long run, this figure surges to 151, higher than both linear television (3.27) and paid social (1.98).

In other words, creators are like a long-term investment: you do not see results immediately this quarter, but over time, they yield more profit than any other channel. The problem is that most budget decisions are made based on short-term numbers.

And here is what Meta found when they tested partnership ads in real-world campaigns:

Metric	Result	Context
Incremental conversion cost	Down 45%	20 conversion lift studies in EMEA, at least 30% of assets are partnership ads
Incremental ROAS	Up 35%	Same dataset of 20 studies
New reach	Up 66%	Same budget, reaching 66% more people
Brand intent lift	Up 71%	14 global brand lift studies when partnership ads account for over 20% of the budget

The 45% figure is not a small improvement. It is the difference between a profitable campaign and a losing one. And according to Meta, it comes from integrating partnership ads into existing ad sets rather than running them as a standalone campaign.

Why are partnership ads so effective?

To understand this, you need to understand the nature of partnership ads. This is not ordinary advertising. This is advertising run from the creator's account, with their permission. It carries the image, voice, and trust that the creator has built with their audience.

Grace Andrews, founder of The Diary of a CEO, shared a quote that resonates with me: "When you work with a creator, you are not buying a position on a feed. You are renting the trust they have built with their audience over time."

That is the key point. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of traditional advertising. They know when a brand is trying to sell them something. But when they see someone they trust recommend a product, their reaction is entirely different. That is no longer an ad. That is a recommendation from a friend.

And partnership ads allow brands to leverage that power at scale, with the targeting and measurement capabilities of a modern advertising platform.

Other notable figures from the report

Beyond the 45% figure, the report reveals several other crucial data points:

• 80% of a creator's value is indirect and passive. According to Charlie Oscar, based on 94 marketing mix models, the majority of value brought by creators does not come from direct clicks but from harder-to-measure impacts like increased brand awareness and behavioral shifts.
• 48% of orders from partnership ads come from new customers, compared to 32% from regular ads. This is proof that partnership ads help brands reach people who have never purchased before.
• L'Oréal reports 35% higher ROI when combining brand content with creator content, based on an analysis of over 1,000 campaigns.
• Omnicom recorded a 52% decrease in cost per ad recall when using partnership ads in a global study with Meta.

How is Meta building its tool ecosystem?

What is worth noting is that Meta did not just publish a report and leave it at that. They are building a complete tool ecosystem to turn partnership ads from an experiment into an indispensable part of every brand's advertising strategy.

Meta Creator Marketing Hub is the center of this ecosystem – a unified interface allowing advertisers to discover creators, search content, manage permissions, and activate partnership ads without switching between multiple tools.

One of the most important upgrades is that the Creator Marketplace now allows searching for creators on both Instagram and Facebook in one place, with over 5 million creators discoverable. This solves one of the biggest barriers for brands: how to find the right person.

Meta also provides specific guidance on how to deploy partnership ads effectively:

• Request account-level permissions from creators to be able to run any of their posts and create new partnership ads without needing an existing organic post.
• Run partnership ads in the same ad set as regular ads, or in the same campaign with Advantage campaign budget, so the system optimizes automatically.
• Use Advantage+ placements, Reels, and dynamic headers to maximize effectiveness.

Traps to watch out for

Like any self-published platform report, you need to read it with a grain of salt. Meta has a clear commercial interest in convincing advertisers to spend more on partnership ads – revenue from this format reached $10 billion in the first quarter of 2026, more than double the same period last year.

Some numbers in the report come from older studies, with data dating back to 2021 in some cases. The confidence level of some reported results is at 92%, lower than the 95% threshold typically used in academic research. And some claims lack clear source citations.

This does not mean the report is untrustworthy. It just means you should view it as a starting point for your own experimentation, not absolute truth. As Meta itself acknowledges in the report: the goal is to prove effectiveness "not by someone else's benchmarks, but by a test run within your own business."

Lessons for Vietnamese marketers

So what should Vietnamese marketers take away from this report? Here is what I believe matters most:

1. Creator marketing is no longer a "secondary channel"

With figures like a 45% reduction in conversion costs and a 66% increase in new reach, partnership ads deserve a central place in your advertising strategy, not just the bottom line of a media plan.

2. Measurement is key

The report emphasizes that the biggest issue with creator marketing is measurement. If you cannot prove effectiveness, you cannot convince leadership to allocate more budget. Invest in proper measurement tools from the start.

3. Integrate, do not separate

Meta recommends running partnership ads in the same ad sets as regular ads so the system optimizes automatically. This is a crucial lesson: do not separate creators from the overarching strategy. Let them complement each other.

4. Quality over quantity

Having many creators does not equal success. The important thing is choosing the right people – those with a genuine fit for the brand and their audience. As brand strategist Eugene Healey warned: using creators as "puppets" breaks the model of trust they have built, leading to immediate disengagement.

5. Start with small experiments

You do not need to change your entire strategy overnight. Meta suggests a three-phase "testing ladder," starting with small tests to compare the current strategy with a version featuring partnership ads. That is a safe and smart approach.

When trust becomes the new currency

I have watched the advertising industry go through many revolutions. From the days when banner ads were heavily clicked, to the era of social media, then the explosion of influencer marketing, and now partnership ads. Each wave brings new opportunities, but also raises new questions about how to measure and prove effectiveness.

Meta's report is not a silver bullet. It does not solve all problems of creator marketing. But it introduces a new mindset framework: instead of evaluating creators by short-term metrics, look at the long-term value they bring. Instead of running partnership ads as a standalone campaign, integrate them into the main flow of your advertising strategy.

And most importantly, the report reminds us that in a world where consumers are increasingly skeptical of traditional advertising, trust is becoming the new currency. Creators own that trust. And partnership ads are the way for brands to access it responsibly and effectively.

With 20 years of experience, I believe that the brands that understand this earliest will be the leaders in the new era of advertising – an era where sincerity, transparency, and trust are not just moral values, but uncopyable competitive advantages.

Have you ever experimented with partnership ads in your campaigns? If so, were the results different from regular ads – and how do you measure that difference? If not, what is holding you back: budget concerns, lack of measurement tools, or simply not believing the platform's published numbers? Share your perspective below, because in this game of creator marketing, those who dare to experiment and learn will reach the finish line first!