Partnership ads beat your in-house creative by 71% — here's the play

Ben Heath dropped a number that should reroute your Q3 ad budget: partnership ads on Meta deliver a 13% higher click-through rate and a 71% higher brand lift than non-partnership ads. That's not a vendor pitch — it's Meta's own internal data, shared at their Performance Marketing Summit, where Heath says roughly half of every talk was about creators.

Meta is so convinced they're partnering with Heath himself to run his face in front of 30 million accounts promoting Meta Verified. They could have generated a thousand AI ads instead. They didn't, because they know nobody's favorite creator is AI-generated.

The Creator Marketplace shortcut

The play isn't "find a mega-influencer." It's finding 2–4 creators whose audience overlaps with your buyer. Heath's process inside Meta's Creator Marketplace:

1. Let Meta's algorithm analyze your account and surface suggestions.
2. Filter for creators who are already running partnership ads with other brands — they're set up, responsive, and clearly producing results.
3. Reach out through the Marketplace inbox, not their public DMs. Creators (Heath included) actually read that one.
4. When you brief them, request permission to run their content as ads. This is the line most advertisers miss. Without it, you get one organic post that disappears in 24 hours. With it, you get assets you can run as paid for months or years.

What to lock down, what to leave loose

In the brief, get specific on the call to action and the hook structure — ask for two to three videos with multiple opening lines so you can rotate creative and dodge ad fatigue. Then get out of their way on script and delivery. They know their audience better than you do.

One more guardrail: do your due diligence. Check if the creator has ever talked about your product before — and whether it was positive. Brand-aligned partners compound. Misaligned ones blow up in your face. Pick two, test fast, scale what works.