Hey everyone,
Welcome back for another bite to chew on.
Paid social keeps getting more expensive and less predictable.
CPMs climb, creative burns out in days, and the usual fix (more budget, more variants, more testing) is the same loop that created the problem.
We all know creator ads outperform brand ads.
Meta’s own data puts partnership ads at 19% lower cost per purchase, and TikTok Spark Ads show 134% higher completion rates and 37% lower CPA than standard brand creative.
And yet only about 4% of brands say they’re happy with their partnership ad spend.
The lever that moves CPA isn’t copy or targeting. It’s who the ad comes from, and affiliate tracking is how you find that person, with sales proof, before you amplify them.
UpPromote is the #1 affiliate influencer marketing app on Shopify, used by 250,000+ merchants with $2B+ in tracked affiliate revenue.
They just put the whole playbook in a FREE guide: seven plays real Shopify brands are running, with the setup and the numbers.
We also sat down with Jay Hunter, CEO of K2O by Kylie Jenner, for his take on running this at scale.
Let’s get into it.
On the menu:
Why partnership ads disappoint even when the format works
Why most brands pick the wrong setup and throw away the face that made the content work
How affiliate tracking turns a creator roster into a paid-ads shortlist, with Jay’s K2O playbook
The partnership ad gap
Brand ads are getting more expensive and losing trust.
A winning concept used to last a quarter; now it can decay in a week.
Media buyers respond the only way the dashboard allows: more spend, more variants, more of the same face. And that face is the brand’s, polished, on-message, easy to ignore.
Meanwhile, 69% of shoppers say they trust a creator’s word more than a regular brand ad, and it hits hardest in beauty, supplements, and fashion, where trust is the product.
Jay has run this math with more budget than almost anyone: 7 years at MaryRuth’s managing an $80M marketing budget, and now K2O, which did millions in sales in its first 130 days.
“Every day Meta’s more competitive than it was yesterday. Finding creators and affiliates that can authentically talk about your brand is still sort of the secret sauce right now.”
So why the 4% number? The format isn’t the bottleneck, the workflow is.
Most teams license a UGC clip, run it from the brand account, and call it a creator ad. That’s the cheapest, weakest version: it keeps the footage and throws away the face.
The trust that made the organic post work doesn’t transfer to a brand handle just because the same person is on screen.
The wrong setup
Partnership ads aren’t one format, they’re five: content-rights, Spark Ads, whitelisted, two-handle, and affiliate-tracked. They’re not interchangeable.
Content-rights is the default because it’s easy: you license the footage and run it from your brand handle. You keep control, but you lose the creator’s identity in the feed.
Spark, whitelist, and two-handle all keep the ad coming from them.
Affiliate-tracked isn’t a placement at all, it’s the measurement layer under the other four: unique links and codes that show which creator produced the sale, not just which ad got the click.
Most brands run content-rights and stop there. That version looks like a partnership ad in the creative doc and behaves like a brand ad in the feed.
The biggest lever is who, not the copy.
Hold the targeting and offer constant, change only the account the ad runs from, and that’s the test Meta’s 19% gap is describing.
A serum on a brand page is a claim.
The same serum on a creator the shopper already trusts is a recommendation.
The shortlist before the spend
Affiliate tracking lets you put product, a link, and a code in a creator’s hands and watch what happens at near-zero media cost.
Some post and produce nothing.
Some quietly outsell people with ten times the following.
You end up with a ranked list of sellers, not a folder of pretty videos, then you spend: Spark the winners, whitelist the winners.
The usual order is pick, pay, boost, hope. Affiliate-first flips it to proof, then amplification.
Jay is blunt about the alternative:
“I really think the wide strategy doesn’t work as well, and I think a lot of brands are going broke trying it. Give away 10,000 samples a month… that strategy doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to be a lot more targeted.”
His operating system in one line:
“Winners win. So we spend all our time on the winning strategies, the winning creators, and the winning products.”
And this works at any size.
KESS Berlin, a vegan makeup brand across four European markets, screened for brand fit and engagement, paid 10% commission plus up to €500 per post, and tracked every sale, generating 44,000+ referrals from 44 active influencers (roughly 1,000 each).
As Pauline Stark, their Influencer Marketing Team Lead, put it:
“We do a lot of quality screening beforehand. We make sure they’re a good fit, that they have strong engagement, and that they match our brand’s target group.”
K2O is the same discipline at the other extreme: 10,000+ creators on a simple, transparent structure (15% commission, 10% when GMV Max ads run, up to 20% for top partners).
And Jay knows who carries it:
“Your top 20% of creators will generate 80% of the revenue.”
They keep the roster active with realistic incentives, like a 60-day challenge guaranteeing $1,000 to any creator who posts one video a day for 60 days, plus a $10,000 winner at the end.
One thing we started at Obvi recently: incentivizing the creators we already work with to refer creators they like.
A referral from someone already selling for you shows up pre-vetted.
K2O runs the same loop, as Jay described it:
“If you refer a creator and they do X dollars in GMV, we’ll give you X bonus.”
Everyone gets paid, the network compounds, and because every new creator gets a tracked link from day one, the ranking sorts itself.
Sum It Up
Partnership ads are a cheaper, more trusted way to run the ads you’re already buying, as long as you pick the right face and the right setup.
The gap: the format works (Meta and TikTok’s own numbers prove it), but most teams run licensed UGC from the brand handle and throw away the face.
The setup: five kinds, content-rights is the weakest. Spark, whitelist, and two-handle keep the creator’s identity in the ad, the variable that actually moves CPA.
The shortlist: test creators at near-zero cost, then put budget behind proven sellers. Kess Berlin ranked 44 this way; Jay runs 10,000+ at K2O on the same principle.
You don’t need a bigger ad budget. You need a different face in the ad, and a ranked list of who deserves the spend. The FREE guide has the seven plays, the brand cases, and the numbers.
Let us know how we did...
All the best,
Ron & Ash