Meta invited me to speak on its Partner API Panel in New York on 14 October. It's still a slightly surreal experience.
I sat alongside Hamza Alsamraee (Co-Founder and CEO, NewForm) and David Richards (Product, Impact), with Matt Felser from Meta Partner Engineering moderating. The topic was Meta's creator APIs, and how the companies building on them help brands and agencies run Partnership Ads at scale.
My slightly nerdy fact for the room: I spend a surprising amount of time thinking about which two names appear at the top of an ad. Here's what I shared.
Finding creators is one job. Getting their content live is another.
Imagine you've got 20 creators, three videos each, and several markets to test. Then your CMO sends a message: "Can we get these all live today?"
Sounds reasonable, until you're the person doing it. Every ad needs the right creator identity, the right post or media, copy, links and ad set, and every one of them has to clear Meta's permission checks.
That handoff, from approved creator content to live ads, is the part we've spent the most time building for at AdManage.
What scale actually looks like
AdManage has recorded 93,617 Meta Partnership Ads, with roughly $27 million in matched media spend.
- We launched 19,348 Partnership Ads in August and 27,651 in September, up 43% in a month.
- One in-house brand launched 2,872 Partnership Ads in September, up from 1,914 in August. Their launch batches fell from 418 to 327, so each batch carried nearly twice as many ads.
- One agency launched 2,026 Partnership Ads in September. In a single batch they launched 156 ads, 130 of them Partnership Ads, in about 4 minutes 22 seconds.
- Our permission graph spans 42,415 creator identities and 766 brand identities.
Doing that one ad at a time in Ads Manager simply isn't realistic. Hiring more creators shouldn't mean hiring someone else just to upload their ads.
Three starting points that look the same but aren't
Brands start a Partnership Ad from one of three places:
- An existing creator post.
- A partnership ad code.
- New content uploaded and run with an approved creator identity.
They look identical to the person launching. Underneath, each needs different permission checks, identity resolution and media preparation.
At this volume, small implementation details get expensive. One example: launching the same creator video into nine ad sets used to trigger nine simultaneous video registrations in the same ad account, and some would fail. We now register the video once and reuse it across every ad set.
Permissions were harder than expected
Authorization isn't one check. It's four connected gates:
- The app's capability.
- The customer's consent for specific assets.
- The creator's authorization.
- The selected content's eligibility.
A token can carry the right branded-content scope and still point at the wrong Instagram identity. Permission is also a state that changes over time. In our latest snapshot, 46,416 creator relationships were approved, 9,740 pending and 2,982 revoked.
The workload is uneven too. The median brand workspace has 14 approved creators, the 95th percentile has 183, and the largest has 3,407. A creator picker that works with 14 creators needs pagination, caching and partial loading to work with 3,000.
In just the first 13 days of October we saw:
- 110 failures because the creator hadn't enabled advertising permission on the post.
- 38 failures where the audience identity didn't match the selected identity.
- 29 failures where partnership permission was still awaiting approval.
What helped most was diagnosing the exact gate that failed and naming the asset the user needed to authorize. My advice to other platforms: test multiple brand identities, multiple ad accounts, Instagram-only creators and revoked consent early, and build clear diagnostics alongside the integration.
A launch is a collection of outcomes
In the first 13 days of October, customers ran 2,817 launch batches containing Partnership Ads. 44 of them had a mix of successful and failed ads.
That's why we treat a launch as many individual outcomes, not one big yes or no. Successful ads keep their IDs, and failed rows stay recoverable, so a retry never repeats work that already went live. We prepare media separately from creating ads, reuse account-level assets and cap how many changes we send Meta at once.
Humans and AI agents on the same rails
Brands now launch through our interface, our API and AI agents, and all three run on the same execution pipeline. In the first 13 days of October our MCP server logged more than 309,000 tool calls, 97.5% of which returned successfully, and around 14% of Partnership Ad batches came through the API.
When an agent launches a Partnership Ad, every permission gate still applies. And if a fallback changes the identity an ad runs with, the caller needs to be told. It's not enough to know a launch completed. You need to know whether the result matches what you asked for.
What I asked Meta for
When Matt asked what we'd want from Meta's roadmap, my answer was a preflight check: one call that confirms whether a specific creator, post, brand identity, ad account and placement will work together before you launch. Most of the failures above could be caught before an ad is ever submitted.
The speed round
- Build it or wait for the API? Build the orchestration. Use the official API for access and delivery.
- AI writes the copy or the human? The human sets the intent. AI drafts the variations.
- More creators or more agents in five years? More of both, with agents handling more of the operational work.
How brands launch Partnership Ads with AdManage
You've found the creators, agreed the briefs and approved the content. With AdManage your media buyer can:
- Bring in approved creator posts, or use partnership ad codes.
- Apply the right creator identities, copy and links across ad sets and markets.
- Review the batch and launch it in one go, or launch from Google Sheets using approved creator usernames.
See the step-by-step guide to launching Partnership Ads in AdManage, or read our guide to Meta Marketing API limits and errors.
Really grateful to the Meta team for having us, and to everyone who came to say hello afterwards. You shouldn't spend the rest of the week uploading creator ads.
Book a demo to see Partnership Ads launch in bulk on your own accounts.
