Instagram Collab & Partnership Ads - a game-changer for collaborative advertising

Instagram Collabs and Partnership Ads - What's new from Meta?

If you’re crazy about influencer content and you spend your Saturday nights researching how it’s integrated into the paid funnel (just us?), then there’s a chance you stumbled upon Instagram's ‘announcement’, rebranding its influencer partnership product as collaborative ads...

When we say announcement, we’re referring to a 170-word blog from Meta that gives you the very basics into potentially the biggest shakeup to collaborative advertising since the creation of the paid partnership product...

So in case you missed this announcement (hehe), we’ve broken down:

• What has changed within Meta’s paid partnership product?

• The meaningful implications Instagram Collab ads have when it comes to working with influencers

• Our own thoughts on the future of collaborative content for social media and digital marketing
  

Meta's example of the content a brand could run partnership ads across

Can you boost a collab post on instagram? What are Instagram Partnership Ads or Meta Collaborative Ads?

Meta has updated its Instagram creator ads product, rebranding ‘content ads’ to ‘Instagram Partnership Ads’, colloquially named collab ads. The rebranding essentially acts as an upgrade, with additional features allowing for more effective use of influencer collaborations. So although the concept behind partnership ads isn’t new, the naming and scope of use have changed significantly.

More specifically:

• The update allows brands to produce content in partnership with a creator, without using an existing post (creating a dark ad)

• Advertisers can boost more variations of UGC, including branded content with the paid partnership label, Instagram Collab posts, @mentions, people tags, product tags, and other content without the paid partnership label

• Once a creator has accepted the partnership request, their audience is shared with the brand, enabling custom audiences to be created. This includes: everyone who has engaged with the creator's account, followers, users who have visited the account, and users who have saved any post or ad

How are Instagram Partnership Ads different from before?

• Previously, advertisers/ brands were only able to boost existing organic creator content with the paid partnership label

• This meant when brands were using influencer content in paid campaigns, there were two options:

  1. boost content from the influencers page through the paid partnership label

  2. use the creator’s content and run as a dark ad (unable to link the creator's handle as a sponsored partner)

• The update now allows for the creation of dark ads with the paid partnership label, resulting in a third option for utilising influencer content

• When using influencer content in paid campaigns, the most effective method of targeting was through interest-based proxies of the influencer's followers

An example of how brands could use Collab Ads…

In a parallel universe, say Heinz identified football fans as their prime target audience, and created an influencer campaign where footballer Erling Haaland ate beans as a nutritious halftime snack...

Erling Haarland's Instagram profile

When using this content in paid campaigns, Heinz would have to build an audience for football fans based on interest pools that Meta has created. To generate these pools, Meta uses data from content that users have interacted with, and the problem is (shock!) Meta’s algorithms are not perfect.

For instance, you might despise football and wonder how you can spend 105 minutes watching TV for there to be 1 shot on target and no goals… However, you may like a goal posted by @Ladbible, and because of this, Meta includes you in one of its football-related interest pools. This would mean that you're included in Heinz’s targeting, and served a video of the Man City squad eating a can of ‘Haaland's halftime Heinz’.

So, even though you're not actually part of Heinz’s prime target audience, you'd be included in it, according to Meta.

The difference with Collab ads...

To get around this, the most effective way to reach their target audience would be to directly serve ads to Haaland’s followers, the users who are most influenced by Haaland.

And right on cue, the update to the partnership product means an influencer's audience is shared with the advertiser/ brand - Heinz can now serve ads directly to Haaland’s followers, more effectively reaching and influencing their target audience vs. interest-based targeting.

Importantly, once Heinz has accepted Haaland as a paid partner, they can use Haaland's handle alongside Heinz’s in a dark ad, without extra permission from Haaland. This effectively gives them free rein of the ad creative variables and needs no further approval from Haaland, provided he's tagged them in the post. It should be noted that, on Instagram, Haaland can see active and inactive ads and has the ability to pause them, however, he would not receive a notification of when the ad goes live.

So in theory, once Heinz has Haaland as a paid partner, they could create unlimited ads in partnership with Haaland, with different copy and creatives, without Haaland's approval…

Ultimately, what does this change to Instagram Partnership Ads mean for brands?

• Increased reach effectiveness with target audience - we’re able to target the followers of users and create lookalikes of users who have engaged with the influencer's profile, building a more specific targeting pool vs. our current interest-based lookalikes

• Increased effectiveness for utilising influencers as a credible role in driving demand gen

• Ability to continually leverage creator partnership permissions (without having to gain access each time)

Our own thoughts on Meta's collab ads...

There’s no doubt that sharing custom audiences is massively beneficial to the influencer and brand. However, given the limited transparency of new ads being set up, it does seem like a ticking time bomb until an advertiser/ brand purposely or accidentally uses a large influencer's handle (like Haaland's) in a campaign that they’ve not been made aware of.

When this happens, the partnership product is likely to be revamped to include greater security, with the influencer having to approve each individual ad. Perhaps this is why Instagram ‘secretly’ announced the rebranding of content ads, and this isn’t the finished product.