The New Influencer: What Our Data Says About Partnership Ads

Let me influence you, to use Partnership ads

I recently caught Paris Hilton’s set at Brighton Pride, where she was introduced as the original influencer. While the performance didn’t leave a lasting impact on me, the idea of an influencer and how we now define that did. The concept has shifted dramatically since then, and platforms have had to shift with it.

Partnership ads have gone from a nice-to-have to one of the most important levers in ecommerce social strategy. Borrowed trust and credibility, access to new audiences, and creative diversity are the headline benefits. These feed directly into the Meta andromeda update, but what’s changed this year is the scale of the results behind them.

Across one of our ecommerce clients, we’ve tracked this shift closely through peak summer (June to July). Here’s what stood out.

1. Spend has scaled, and so has efficiency

In summer 2025, partnership ads accounted for just 4.7% of paid social budget. This year, that’s grown to 19.3%, a 310% increase in the proportion of spend year on year. In practice, this means:

• We’re still below Meta’s recommended allocation of up to 50% of budget, so there’s room to keep scaling
• Crucially, efficiency has improved alongside spend, not at the expense of it
• Ad volume has grown from 13 to 37 ads, giving us far greater creative diversity
• Revenue share has more than quadrupled, from 6% to 25% of total revenue, growing well ahead of spend.

2. The performance numbers are hard to ignore

Looking at just the last week of data, the results have been some of the strongest we’ve seen from any ad format at this scale:

• Revenue up 364%
• Sales up 745%
• ROAS up 75%

Partnership ads are also outperforming non-partnership ads by 11% on efficiency. 

Part of this comes down to format. Each creator brings their own distinct video style, which plays directly into how Meta’s Andromeda update evaluates and serves content, rewarding variety and authenticity over a single polished brand look.

3. The audience response isn’t where you’d expect

The assumption with creator-led content is usually that younger audiences respond best. Our data says otherwise.

• 18-34 year olds saw revenue growth of 100% year on year
• 45-54 year olds saw growth of 388%
• 55-64+ saw growth of 536%

The likely explanation is exposure. Younger audiences were probably already familiar with this ad format last year, so the headroom for growth was smaller. Older demographics, by contrast, are responding to something that still feels new and credible to them.

Demographic performance will always be shaped by the specific creators, products and services involved, but this pattern is worth factoring into any partnership ad strategy targeting a broader age range.

Is this sustainable?

Strong short-term performance raises an important longer-term question. Influencers and creators can’t fully embody a brand’s values in the way owned content can, and if audience trust in the format starts to erode, the efficiency gains we’re seeing now may not hold.

Looking across this data, a few themes stand out:

• Partnership ads are scaling in both spend and efficiency at the same time, not one at the cost of the other
• Format diversity is being directly rewarded by platform algorithms like Andromeda
• Older demographics are an underused growth opportunity within this format
• Long-term sustainability will depend on maintaining brand trust as reliance on creator content grows

There’s a wider backdrop to this too. As feeds fill up with AI-generated content, generic, polished, increasingly hard to distinguish from anything real, UGC and creator content is becoming one of the few remaining signals of authenticity. Brands are leaning into that deliberately.

We’re only just starting to understand this shift, with plenty still unanswered; Does the following size of creator impact performance? Are these formats only beneficial for sales? How long is this trend going to last?

For advertisers, the opportunity is to keep scaling deliberately, testing which creators and formats hold audience trust best, rather than chasing short-term performance alone.

If you’d like to talk through how partnership ads could fit into your social strategy, get in touch with our team or explore more Insights below.