Meta Partnership Ads Now Make Up 30 to 50% of the Ads on Our Biggest Accounts

0:00Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The D2C podcast is brought to you by Pilothouse, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing D2C brands in the world. Creative, media, and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade-off. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to pilothouse.co and now on with the show. Partnership ads, something you got to be leveraging at this point.

0:33Partnership ads run directly through a creator's handle with your brand tagged above the ad. It'll show, you know, your brand with creator's name. Are partnership ads more incremental than other ad formats on Meta? Yeah, definitely in terms of delivery costs. Typically, the CPMs are going to be a lot better on them. How much do you need to spend on one of these concepts or one of these creators before you can determine if you've got something that can scale? It's not like you need 100 creators, but you are reaching out to quite a few.

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2:24It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric. This is the DTC podcast, and I am here with Jacob from the Pilot House team. Welcome, Jacob. Welcome to the All Killer, No Filler podcast. What are we talking about today? Yeah, today we're going to talk about partnership ads, more specifically meta partnership ads, how it's handled, the wins you can find out of it, a few steps for those who are maybe not quite in the loop on some of the changes there, and to go through the partnership ads hub, creator marketplace, and yeah, something you got to be leveraging at this point. Yeah. I think that is clear. We had Abe's on recently and she talked about ads coming from the creator's handle being about 70 % more efficient.

3:08MetaZone data also shows that a lot of brands are going this way. We've talked about so many different things on this podcast from whitelisting creatives to going out to find UGC and working with influencers. Just define exactly what the partnership ads are? Yeah, I mean, so partnership ads run directly through a creator's handle with your brand tagged. There's essentially two partners to the post. Above the ad, it'll show your brand with creator's name. It combines the creator's audience engagement signals with your brand's audience engagement signals. So there's a mutual benefit there. And it ultimately does lead to lower costs, like you said.

3:50And brands are starting to lean heavier and heavier into those. And this is versus the traditional dark posting white listing setup where maybe you have access to a creator's handle, but you're still building the ads and just running it under their handle. This is very much a co-branded thing where it shows both partners' names on the ad, which different benefits of both. But those are what we're going to talk about today. And also, it's also like a network, right? So it's a discovery network where you because traditionally, you'd have to find and seek out all these people on their own handles on Instagram, necessarily to get them to be part of your army.

4:27This is all built into meta, and you can actually do it through the meta platform. Yeah. So they built out like the partnership ads hub where you can basically it's all integrated, right? With ad accounts and you can seek out people posting about you. You can chat through there. And when it comes time to actually connect it, you can just connect the creator posts to your account right through there. And obviously both sides need to authorize it. But yeah, it's a whole network that's right on Meta in the partnership ads hub. And they're releasing lots of new features for it right now. It's a big focus of theirs.

5:02And some platforms, you kind of have to manage those off platform. And Meta's trying to make that easy. It's pretty cool that they combine the signals from the creators, audience engagement signals with the same ones from your account. So there's a real opportunity for synergy there. Just hammer home the why from your perspective. How critical are these ads in almost all of your accounts at this point? Pretty critical in most of them. In terms of the why, obviously, a few benefits. We just mentioned one, the combining of audience engagement signals and stacking beyond a reach you've already hit.

5:40The opportunity to really work outside the box on the ad framing, the messaging, maybe get a little bit creative. of you utilizing that partner's presence in the ad not that that is a a need you could just take a few top ads and if you run them as a partnership ad we're now you know both both partners are promoting that post um that also has benefits but yeah a third one is also just the the ad blind list you know a lot of clients are seeing senior brands ads so much that eventually it does just become fog and people scroll right by it. But coming from that creator's profile, leverage with yours, it really helps build that trust, give them a fresh view and yeah, ultimately help with like the frequency and people interacting with your ads essentially.

6:30How often do these ads become like, are they often in the mix for one of the main drivers of revenue in a campaign? And do you have any data on whether these, because you're reaching the data from the creator. Are partnership ads more incremental than other ad formats on Meta? Yeah, definitely in terms of delivery costs. Typically, the CPMs are going to be a lot better on them, so they will deliver a lot more efficiently. In terms of conversion and return on ad spend, it is just going to depend on the quality of those ads and your general book of business. But yeah, in terms of being incremental to generate that new audience, that prospecting audience, definitely 100 % and should be a core part of everyone's strategy.

7:18You don't necessarily need to isolate them into their own campaign or anything. You can treat them as normal ad units and be testing them consolidated with your other ads. Let Meta kind of use its AI to really deliver the ads that thinks are going to convert with different people. But definitely incremental, yeah. Are the CPMs lower just because it's easier to get a human person's profile on someone's news feed versus a brand's page? Is that the reason the CPMs are lower? partly that partly people kind of stop stop scroll for it a bit more kind of like we mentioned just having the the partnership uh handles show on on top of the ad so if you're getting more more eyeballs people are stopping engaging with it a bit more meta is going to kind of deliver it at a better better pace to that audience and yeah your cost per you know thousand people reached is going to go down and down and just like if you had a you know static image that's right in your face like stop scrolling and meta would probably disable that, but that would probably have a super cheap CPM, right?

8:22It's just that the traffic of that quality might not, not be there. So you still kind of need to balance, balance those metrics, but typically partnership, you know, video ads have the best sort of CPMs account wide from what we're seeing. The ad blindness is a good point. And it probably just fits well with the overall philosophy of, of Andromeda, where you want to show different looks and different sort of parts of the consumer journey and potentially different avatars that all fit into, you know, the ad sequencing that Meta does. So I imagine these, it always reminds me of the Chekhov quote, which was, don't tell me about the moonlight, show me it glinting off of a broken bottle on the ground.

9:01And I think when you're in that conversion funnel, just seeing reflections and different takes on a product are just going to help move you down that funnel. 100%. Yeah. And yeah, they all kind of, you know, some of the USPs and messaging is going to overlap with what you're saying. And once they're hooked, the hooks are still as important as ever. You kind of relate it back to your general strategy and people can piece that together, obviously, nicely. So it's, yeah, it's a good ad format. And, you know, like I said, different benefits and like dark posting, for example, where you're just posting ads under creator handles or whitelisting where they're making a post about you.

9:41You're taking their ad account ID or their post ID and promoting it under their handle, combining the power of the two handles into the one ad, essentially. You can imagine that benefit on the viewership side. Talk to me about creative formats. What is a why I switch video? And maybe walk me through an example of one that really worked. Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of the creative formats, I mean, we typically focus them around like a more authentic feeling, organic feeling. we've had like even creators just literally talk about the brand and like a first person you know with their iphone just a bit of a shaky cam just like your standard you know tiktok reel and those have done well because it feels organic authentic when you're you're gonna have a creator partnership ad you don't want it to be very like in your face by now by now by now so a few that have worked is like you know why i switched um problem solution videos why i switched to you know this brand because here's the issues i was having and this is you know the solution like i said hooks being important to that uh holiday gift guides also seem to do pretty well you know you can kind of work outside the box with those a little more work with a partner on on a gift guide that you guys are included on maybe you're you know obviously number one or whatever and they can kind of go through that list.

11:03And that's a good ad we've seen in a few accounts. And then just raw, unedited, you know, smartphone unboxings, things like that, that will typically be a good fit for partnership ads. I could really see it working well for gifting where you could just sort of present, you know, an avatar of someone who has to buy a gift for a mother or father or sister and just have a different, you know, if your gift fits into those categories, it'd be really cool to have, yeah, examples for each creator, you know, using your product as a gift for a certain person in their life. Yeah, 100%. And the partnership hub is going to have creators in your vertical that it suggests to you.

11:40And so their audiences are going to be overlapping as well in that regard. So you can use that hub to link up with these specific creators based on the demographics you're trying to hit, your brand identity and strategy. And then from there, you brief them. And that brief hits on that exact point. and you're all of a sudden testing different user intent and hooks and all these things with your partners to lock that in. How do usage rights work? Does Meta pay them off the back end? Or are you paying fees on top of what Meta is charging for the CPMs? Yeah, so that's kind of the part where it just links you up with the creator in a chat.

12:23There's like a connect accounts synchronization button that you press And it gives you like the post code, postcode it's called, and you can load that up into your campaigns. But in terms of like the rights and payments and things like that, at the moment, it's mainly handled through that chat. So you kind of typically would take that part offline or whatever with the partner. And what does a deal typically look like? I guess you have all sorts of different ways that you run it, but what's your favorite way to deal with the creator side of things? Yeah, there's, I mean, kind of two approaches.

12:57There's like the whole affiliate side where maybe you're sending them the products and giving them like a code in their link and tracking that and giving them like some type of commission. And that usually would have some, you know, period 60 days unless we mutually agree to extend. but there's also just like the standard kind of setup where you're paying them per video and then potentially paying them for like partnership rights. But at the same time, there's tons of situations where there's no payment needed because they're also looking for that exposure. It's going to be your, you know, ad dollars, right?

13:39So it does kind of lean a couple different ways based on what your strategy is. for the most part, you know, the partners we're bringing on where we're paying them to do like the videos for us. And then we're negotiating the partnership ads as part of that, just kind of lumped in. And then, like I said, usually it has like a 60 day period or whatever. And we talk a lot and people in the industry talk a lot about the creative velocity that is required to run meta campaigns at scale these days. How do you think about partnership ad velocity at, you know, in terms of a scaling account? What sort of, or for instance, for one of your bigger or faster scaling accounts, what does a partnership ad campaign look like that you're kind of planning out for Q4?

14:27Yeah, yeah. So it'll be like basically forecasting, you know, how much percent of our budget is going to partnership ads? What's the, you know, benchmarks versus standard stuff? And we're just kind of working that plan into your forecast. And then it's, you know, how many creators do we need versus the depth of each creator? How many videos per creator are we going to get? And usually at the start, you're going to kind of spread your net a little wider the first couple of months, you're going to test more types of creators, and then you're going to kind of narrow them down to your brand's top performers.

14:59And eventually you will start working with more of a focused approach there. You still will probably We want to be sending out general briefs to bring on new faces, but as it relates to your creator budget and all that, it's going to make sense to like focus onto a core set of them and they kind of become like your brand, brand heroes in a way. And, you know, pairing that to, to Q4, like you're just going to want to, yeah, make sure you kind of have like a focused approach. You're getting a briefing creators, you know, three, four weeks ahead of a sale so that they can actually call out the sale.

15:34A lot of the times you might want to use like generic sale languaging. Oh my God, this brand's amazing. You know, I buy them every day. Oh, I also hear they have a sale on right now versus like, you know, 20 % off in the store for limited time this day to this day, because once that, that sale ends, the, the partnership ad doesn't make a lot of sense. And the, um, the partners sometimes don't like the optics of that, you know, using their face promoting stuff that's expired. And you want to just make that personal connection, right? You want to start with the, hey, this is a brand I love. I've built it into my life in the following ways.

16:11And there's a sale, right? Rather than just blasting sale language to everyone, because it kind of misses the whole point of partnership ads potentially. Yeah. And then eventually, as you have your ROI on these partnership ads and a broader outlook of it, you'll be sort of just as any business unit projecting and dedicating a budget to it. And yeah. You know that feeling when you're pouring money into social and it feels like you're just fighting everyone else for the same feed space? What if we told you that adding TV to the mix doesn't just add a new channel, but it makes all your other channels work harder?

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17:18And right now, if you're a new advertiser, you can use promo code UADTC to get$1 ,500 in matched ad credits. That's your first campaign doubled. Terms apply. Head to universalads.com to get your brand on TV today. So on an account then that like what give me the ranges for what partnerships are in terms of percent of meta ad spend on I guess I know it varies but on on an account that's scaling and like has big goals in, in Q4 and is, is fairly aggressive, like what percent of the budget to partnership ads represent? Yeah. So for like the larger accounts that are, um, you know, investing more heavily into the partnership ads and like really having that, you know, allocated budget, like we said, to build it up in the accounts, it's typically like 30 to 50 % of the total ads are running under, under partnership.

18:14It's still kind of like a 60, 40 video to static split on the account. But then from that 60%, you know, video, usually it's like, yeah, more than half of that is, is partnership ads. So it's, it's growing for sure. Like that's way more than it was six months ago, but, uh, there is a lot of, you know, opportunities to work it in beyond just the buy now, buy now, you know, things like giveaways, for example, you know, challenges, um, there's, there's all these things that you can start to utilize it for and just making sure you're measuring it is obviously important, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's been interesting to kind of see it, see it grow.

18:54Very cool. What a, what a big opportunity heading into, into Q4 here. Any, any thoughts on test budgets for brands that maybe aren't as big into partnership ads? Like how much do you need to spend on a, on one of these concepts or one of these creators before you can determine if you've got something that can scale? Yeah. I mean, like I said, there's still a ton of brands that aren't, you know, spending too heavily in this yet. And maybe it's, it's 0 % of their, their strategy and they're still doing really well, or maybe it's 10%, but it's, it's an opportunity. So you don't need to dedicate a ton to it, you know, take, take 10, 15 % of your budget for a month and, you know, work to get some partnership ads live, you know, measure up those upfront costs.

19:37Typically it's maybe a hundred, 200, 300 per creator for a few videos for, you know, 60 days usage, something like that. Like it's, it's not a ton. You can also focus on micro creators and for a new smaller brand, this would make more sense. Don't necessarily go over like the mega, the mega influencers, you know, find niche creators that are also looking to grow that are going to be more passionate about promoting you link up with them start to kind of work on a cadence where every month they're getting you two to three videos and you'll start to like you know make your life a lot easier that way focusing on those micro creators and they do generate in our experience like very similar performance um obviously you're losing out on some of the the audience engagement signals and things like that but you're you're gaining like a closer working relationship with them and moving faster on tests with them and it's slightly, you know, less for less upfront costs with them too.

20:36So it's interesting because, you know, that is still going to push to your audience that your pixels kind of, uh, working towards. And once you approach them with these micro creators, the benefits are still there. So. Would you say generally, even at campaigns that we're scaling, we're using with mainly these smaller influencers, like why pay for the big boys if the smaller ones work just as well. Have we experimented with paying some of the fees of the bigger macro influencers? There's a couple brands that, you know, typically we're not the ones doing that negotiation. Like it's us working with the brands and we're kind of, you know, working the partnership ads hub.

21:14But once it goes offline, a lot of that kind of does go to the brand side because they're going to need to, you know, figure out payment details and stuff like that. But we have tested it on a few brands where we're working with these really large mega influencers. I wouldn't necessarily call them all A-list celebrities, but people that have a following for sure. And yeah, it works. You typically on those ones will have isolated campaigns and kind of run these whole campaigns around it. Maybe you're even building a landing page with these partners on them to kind of have that congruent messaging from ad click to landing page.

21:53So that's like more of a focused, you know, like I said, more upfront costs, but more of a scale play once you're at, you know, at a certain section or if you've identified a need to really move quick on getting awareness out there, like that would make more sense. But yeah, the micro creators probably is more like 80 % of what we're working with, maybe even 90 versus like 10 % kind of major, major influencers. And then you mentioned post-click there. Is there anything you do different post-click, say for the 90 % of micro or nano influencer or creatives that you work with? Is there anything you change for the post-click experience or would it be similar as if you were driving from your own handle?

22:33Yeah, on the micro-influencer ones, it's usually pretty similar unless it is a gift guide or something. It's nice to have a page that's matching that. But yeah, typically for the evergreen stuff, for all these micro-creator videos, it is your top URL destinations that you're linking to. But like I said, if it's a focused campaign around certain partners, a lot of the time you're going to have a dedicated landing page for that as well. Very cool. Is there any room in this? I know people that are running a lot of TikTok shop and building affiliate networks there. They have to do a lot of sort of like competitions within their program or whatever, where you'll have, you know, a leaderboard for the top affiliates or anything.

23:15Is there any room to build anything like that in the meta partner ad environment? Yeah. So you can like definitely start little communities. I think there's like a subsection on that as well. You could also get some of these creators into your Discord, things like that. If you have an existing affiliate management structure where you have all your creators and things like that, a lot of brands will do it in Discord communities or agencies as well. So you can still kind of import them into there and things like that. But in terms of actually in meta, it's mainly using that communities section. And I do think they're adding functionality to do things like that.

23:53Super cool. Any other final advice on either creative formats? We mentioned the one creator format. I think there was a few others maybe we glossed over, but anything else on the creative side or on the campaign setup side, like how to find the right people and test and scale? You know, if you're thinking about a traditional like UGC, there's going to be a lot of overlap there on the types of creators that you might want to also hit. I would say to try to get in there and, you know, secure permissions and get these things going earlier rather than later, just so you're not fighting for access, for example, during like a November rush.

24:30The steps are pretty simple. Like it's all online. You just got to get permissions or an ad code from the creator. and again in the partnership hub that can make it easier you enable like the partnership ad toggle at your ad level and then you just select that brand identity and it's gonna allow you to kind of upload the creatives or choose an existing approved post and you can build the ad out and there you go so but there is a lot of little issues sometimes where creators aren't going to get back to you for a week or two so you're going to want to get ahead of some of that stuff and then yeah in terms of like identifying what you want to be testing i would say start kind of around what you know is gonna probably work so take some of your top messaging and then transfer it over to more of like a partner partnership fit like a stronger hook that feels more organic like a partner would be saying it you know very native feeling like we said some ideas like the why i switched to this brand or you know smartphone unboxings those are those are good starting points And from there, you'll kind of start to take your winning signals and, hey, you know, creators that are in this vertical or this niche are outperforming.

25:41Let's get more of them. And you sort of self-learn your system through that process. For a brand that hasn't done this, and so say that let's take a$5 million brand. They're spending somewhere from half a million to a million a year on meta. So that's working to$50K, maybe to$100K a month. and they haven't done partnership ads, how many creators are they going to want to have on staff, essentially, to take them through Q4? Is it an ongoing thing where you're trying to reach out to 20 and maybe you get 10? What sort of scale at that kind of ad spend are we talking about? Yeah, I'd say to start, it'd be taking around...

26:23You're going to want to dedicate at least$5 ,000 a month to this to get any noticeable signals. if you're around 100K spend. So I would suggest closer to 10K, like maybe 10 % of your ad budget, which is going to scale up for larger brands or lower. But yeah, 10 % and that's going to cover three to five creators typically with one to two videos from each creator. That definitely is enough to get you enough signals. You put, when you factor in their content costs and stuff, maybe from that 10k you're spending 7k or 8k on on ad spend and you just need to yeah basically give yourself a two three week buffer to actually get the content edited you know whatever is needed figure out the ad codes and then you start launching it and yeah month two month three if you can get to 20 of your ad budget by bringing on a couple additional creators plus continuing the relationship with the winning ones, it slowly starts to build.

27:28It's not like you need a hundred creators to prove out the concept, but you are reaching out to quite a few and not all of them are going to work out. Maybe you're reaching out to, like you said, 20 and kind of selecting the five best while also ignoring the ones that just don't get back to you. Nice. Yeah. There's also like strategies where you can send out briefs or whatever to tons of creators and then just be more selective, but it's going to take more time to monitor all those conversations and everything as well. So we say start focus, you know, four or five creators, get a few of your top concepts like testing and you'll be able to start scaling out.

28:08Yeah, the partnership ads as you get into November here, December. I love that. And then what are the metrics? So say in that first month, what are we really looking? Are we looking for, you know, within that first month that a couple of these ads, are going to be ROI positive? Are they things that sort of stay in the account, even if they don't have amazing CPA number? What are we looking for in the metrics to really scale that? Yeah. Unless you're doing a dedicated giveaway or some type of side initiative like that, you're still going to be focused on your North Star metrics, like purchase, conversion rate, return on ad spend.