TAKE Paid social and ecommerce teams

Instagram Reels Ads: Facebook Reels Ads, Partnership Ads and Branded Content Ads, from Your Handle or a Creator's

There is no "Reels ad" object in Meta Ads Manager. There is an ad, a set of placements, and a decision about whose handle it runs from. Those two facts explain almost everything advertisers find confusing here, including why a fully built campaign can sit there spending nothing. Meta documents the rules in its developer reference rather than its help center, so this page quotes them directly. Or start on the right: paste a product page URL and get a vertical creative.

Meta's own developer docs, quoted Where partnership ads beat us, said plainly What Meta does not publish, flagged

Ad Recipe

TAKE

Pick a Creator

Hook Style

Free to start - no credit card required

The short answer Last updated September 2026

Instagram Reels ads and Facebook Reels ads are not a separate ad type you buy. Reels is a placement, so you build an ordinary Meta ad, supply a vertical creative, and Reels is one of the surfaces it can be delivered into. The decision that actually changes your economics is whose handle appears on it. Run it from your own Page and it is a normal Reels ad. Run it from a creator's handle and it becomes a partnership ad, which Meta's developer documentation describes as letting you "run Facebook and Instagram ads from a creator or other partner's handle to expand your collaborations." That second route is the same idea the industry has called whitelisting for years and the same thing Meta's API still calls branded content, and it comes with a dependency most guides skip: the creator has to approve it. Meta's docs are explicit that "if you publish the ad without permissions in place, Meta publishes the ad in a pending delivery state." Your campaign is built, funded and scheduled, and it delivers nothing until somebody outside your company taps approve.

3 routes

Ways a Reels ad can reach the feed

60 days

Meta's creator content lookback

Dec 1, 2026

Legacy endpoint removal date

$49

UGCGen, per month flat

Read this first

Reels is a placement, not a product you can buy

Open Ads Manager looking for "Instagram Reels ads" and you will not find them, because there is no such campaign objective and no such ad format. There is an ad, and there is a placement list, and Reels sits on that list next to Feed, Stories, Explore and Marketplace. The neighbouring vertical surface has its own rules worth reading before you build one asset for both, and we cover them on Instagram Story ads. Leave placements on the automatic setting, which is the default, and your ad becomes eligible for Reels whether or not anyone on your team designed for it. That is why so many brands are technically already running Reels ads and have never once made a vertical video. What reaches a Reels viewer in that situation is your square or four by five asset placed into a full screen vertical surface, and it looks exactly like what it is.

What you are deciding	Automatic placements, feed creative	A creative built for Reels
What you upload	One square or 4:5 asset for everything	A dedicated full screen vertical cut
Who decides where it runs	Meta's delivery system, across every placement	Still Meta, but the Reels version was designed on purpose
How it looks in Reels	Adapted to fill the vertical surface, often with the composition cropped or letterboxed	Native. The subject sits where the viewer is looking
Interface overlays	Captions and product text can end up under the on screen buttons	Composed with the bottom and right of the frame kept clear
Production cost per placement	Lowest. One asset covers the account	Higher with a crew, near zero if the vertical cut is generated
What you learn from the data	Blended results. Weak Reels performance can hide inside a healthy account average	A clean read on whether the vertical format works for the product
Best for	Small accounts where one creative has to cover every surface	Any account where Reels and Stories are a meaningful share of impressions

A note on specifications, because this is where most Reels articles quietly guess. Meta's Instagram ads media requirements reference in the developer documentation covers the Stream, Explore and Stories placements and does not contain a Reels entry. Rather than publish pixel dimensions we cannot source to Meta, the reliable check is the placement preview inside Ads Manager itself, which renders your asset in the actual Reels surface with the live interface overlays on top of it. That preview is authoritative in a way that any third party spec sheet, including this one, is not.

Straight from the source

Seven things Meta publishes about partnership ads that almost no Reels guide mentions

Partnership ads are documented in Meta's Marketing API reference, not in the business help center most advertisers read. That is the whole reason these rules are so widely missed: they are written for engineers and they describe constraints that land on media buyers. Each sentence below is Meta's, quoted as written.

1. What you are actually buying

"Partnership ads allow you to run Facebook and Instagram ads from a creator or other partner's handle to expand your collaborations."

Read the object of that sentence. You are not buying a video, you are buying the right to appear as someone else. The creative is the smaller half of the transaction. The handle is the part that changes how the ad is received, and the part you cannot produce yourself at any budget.

2. The sentence Meta wrote as a convenience

"If you publish the ad without permissions in place, Meta publishes the ad in a pending delivery state."

Meta means this kindly. It lets you build ahead of the paperwork instead of blocking the whole workflow. Now change one variable, the one nobody controls, and read it again: your launch date belongs to a person who does not work for you and is not on your Slack. A pending delivery state is not an error, so it does not shout. The campaign looks finished. Spend is zero and the number that tells you why is buried in an ad level status column. Every experienced partnership ads buyer has lost at least one launch morning to exactly this.

3. Approval is a request, not a setting

"The creator receives a permission request from the brand, which, once approved, allows the ad to be delivered."

The permission travels to the creator as a notification and waits. Nothing in your ad account can accelerate it. The practical fix is unglamorous and completely effective: get the permission granted during onboarding, before the media plan exists, rather than on the day you want to go live.

4. There is a code, just like TikTok

"Use a partnership ad code to create an ad using the ads creation APIs."

Meta's partnership ad code is the direct equivalent of the authorization code on TikTok Spark Ads, and it plays the same role in a brief. The creator generates it, sends it to you, and you paste it in. If you already run creator media on TikTok, ask for both codes in the same message and stop treating them as separate processes.

5. The disclosure label is a gate, not a formality

"Recommendations are currently only available for partnership ads posts that have explicitly used the paid partnership label."

Meta also documents that this content discovery has a three day lag and only surfaces content published within the last 60 days. So a creator who forgot the paid partnership label on a post that performed has produced something you cannot easily find and promote, and a great post from four months ago has aged out of the discovery surface entirely. Put the label in the brief as a deliverable, in the same line as the aspect ratio.

6. A missing Facebook Page silently halves your buy

"If there is no hard link between the Instagram and Facebook accounts, the ad will not be delivered to that specific platform."

Meta adds that where a creator has no Facebook Page and you substitute your own page ID, "the ad will not be delivered to Facebook." This is the quietest failure on the whole list. You planned a Facebook and Instagram partnership buy, you are paying for both, and half of it never runs because a creator who lives on Instagram never made a Page. Check for the linked Page before the media plan is signed, not after.

7. The API still calls it branded content, and one endpoint is dated for removal

Permission scope: instagram_branded_content_ads_brand

Meta renamed branded content ads to partnership ads, but the permission scope your integration requests still carries the old name, which is why "branded content ads" and "partnership ads" describe the same object and both terms remain in circulation. Meta's docs also state that the legacy creator content endpoint will be "removed on December 1, 2026" and that brands should migrate to the Advertisable Content Discovery API beforehand. If any part of your creator sourcing is automated, that date belongs on an engineering calendar now rather than in December.

What Meta does not publish

TikTok tells you exactly how long a Spark Ads authorization lasts: 7, 30, 60 or 365 days, chosen by the post owner. We could not find an equivalent published expiry for a Meta partnership ad permission, and the partnership ads documentation does not state one the way TikTok's help center does. Rather than assert a duration we cannot source, treat the permission as revocable at will, keep a record of which creators have granted account level permission and which have only approved a single post, and confirm the grant is still live before you scale spend behind a partner creative. Where a specification genuinely is not published, saying so is more useful than filling the gap with a confident number.

The decision that matters

Three routes into the Reels feed, and Meta names all three

Most Reels advertising advice describes one route and assumes it is the only one. Meta's own documentation tree describes three, and the third is the one almost nobody uses, partly because it is filed under a heading media buyers never open. Understanding which of these you are buying decides your timeline, your dependency and what you can legally claim.

	1. Your own Page	2. Boost a creator's existing post	3. New creative under a partner handle
Whose handle appears	Yours	The creator's	The creator's, on a video they never posted
Does an organic post have to exist	No	Yes, and it must carry the paid partnership label to be discoverable	No
Creator approval needed	None	Yes, per post or account level	Yes, and the partner must be named as sponsor
Inherits comments and views	No, starts cold	Yes, that is the point of it	No, the creative is new
How fast you can iterate	Same day	As fast as the creator posts, usually weeks	Same day, once the permission exists
Main failure mode	No borrowed credibility	Pending delivery while you wait on approval	No linked Facebook Page means no Facebook delivery
Best for	Volume testing and anything you must control	A creator post that already earned real engagement	A long term partner relationship where you supply the creative

Route three deserves a paragraph, because it is the one that changes what is possible. Meta's documentation for creating a partnership ad with a new ad creative describes naming the creator with a sponsor identifier on a creative you upload yourself. In plain language: the creator's handle can front a video that was never on their grid. That is a genuinely different arrangement from boosting a post, and it turns a creator partnership from a content deal into an identity licence. It also means the production bottleneck disappears, because you are no longer waiting for someone to film and publish before you can spend. What it does not do, and this matters, is remove the honesty obligation. If the partner's name is on the ad, the partner must actually have agreed to endorse the product.

Terminology, settled

Whitelisting ads, branded content ads and partnership ads are the same thing

Three names, one mechanic, and the confusion costs real money in briefs and contracts. "Whitelisting" is the agency term, coined when the arrangement was informal and a creator handed over account access. "Branded content ads" was Meta's own name for the formal version, and it survives inside the API permission scope. "Partnership ads" is the current product name. If a creator's contract says whitelisting and your media plan says partnership ads, they are describing the same grant, and the only thing that matters is which technical permission was actually given.

Post level permission

The creator approves one specific piece of content for use as an ad. Narrow, safe, and the source of most pending delivery incidents, because every new post restarts the request. Right for one off collaborations and for a creator you are testing.

Account level permission

The creator grants your business ongoing standing to run ads from their handle. This is what people mean by whitelisting, and it is what turns a partnership into something you can actually run performance media against, because you stop asking permission per asset.

The operational advice is short. Ask for account level permission in the first contract, name it in the deliverables so it is not a favour requested later, and confirm the grant is live before a campaign depends on it. Meta describes the mechanism plainly enough; what it does not do is tell your creator relations lead that the difference between these two settings is the difference between a launch that goes out on Monday and a launch that goes out whenever someone checks their notifications. For a wider view of how these grants get priced and written into briefs, see how UGC creator marketplaces handle content and usage rights.

The mechanics

How to run an Instagram Reels ad, in the order that avoids the failures above

Nothing here is difficult. The sequence is what saves you, because three of the four steps are things that are painless to do early and expensive to do late.

Settle the handle before the creative

Decide whether this ad runs from your Page or a partner's. If a partner's, get the permission granted now, at contract stage, and confirm the creator has a Facebook Page linked to the Instagram account if you want Facebook delivery.

Make a vertical cut, not a resized square

Compose full screen with the subject high in the frame, keep the lower band and right edge clear of the interface, and open on a visual that reads in the first second. Burned in captions, because a large share of Reels viewing starts muted.

Check the placement preview, every time

Ads Manager renders your creative in the live Reels surface with the real overlays on top. Since Meta's developer reference does not publish Reels media requirements, that preview is your specification. Look at it before you publish, not after a week of spend.

Publish, then verify delivery status

On any partnership ad, check the ad status rather than assuming a published campaign is a live one. Pending delivery is the state that looks like success and spends nothing. Confirm impressions are accruing within the first hour.

If you are producing the vertical cut in step two rather than commissioning it, the same script can become several openings in an afternoon, which is the only realistic way to keep a Reels placement supplied with fresh creative. That workflow is covered in more depth on ecommerce video ads and, for the specifically vertical formats, on TikTok UGC ads.

What it costs

Instagram Reels ads cost, with the unsourceable parts labelled

Two thirds of what you will spend here is an auction price nobody can quote you honestly in advance, and one third is production, which is entirely within your control. Being clear about which is which is more useful than a benchmark CPM copied from a blog that copied it from another blog.

Cost line	What it is	Where the number comes from
Media	Whatever the auction charges to reach your audience	Set by you, delivered at auction. No published rate exists and any CPM figure you read is somebody else's account, not a price list
Partnership ad surcharge	None that Meta publishes	Running from a partner handle is a creative and permissions setting, not a priced upgrade
Creator fee	Content, plus usage or whitelisting rights	Negotiated privately. Usage is frequently a separate line from the content fee and is where partnership deals get expensive
Crewed production	A filmed vertical spot	Vendor published estimates, commonly 3,000 to 8,000 US dollars per day for a small crew. Treat as an estimate, not a quote
Generated vertical creative	UGCGen, unlimited variants within plan	Published: Starter 49 dollars, Plus 149 dollars, Pro 499 dollars per month

The comparison that actually decides budgets is not media against media, it is cost per additional creative variant. A Reels placement consumes creative quickly, and the account that can put six genuinely different openings into an ad set this week learns six times faster than the account waiting on one filmed asset. For the full vendor by vendor breakdown of what generated ad video costs, see AI UGC pricing.

Where we are not the answer

Generate the video. Do not generate the partner

We make vertical ad video with AI presenters, and it is a good fit for a Reels placement running from your own Page, or as the creative inside a partnership ad where the partner has genuinely agreed to it. There are two things we cannot supply and will not pretend to. The first is the partner: a real account with a real audience who really said yes. The second is the paid partnership label, which is a disclosure to consumers, not a decoration. Applying it to a relationship that does not exist, or building a presenter designed to look like a specific creator's endorsement, is a lie told to a shopper. We would not help with that and would not defend it.

Pay a creator and run a partnership ad when

The handle is the point. You are buying the trust their audience already gave them.
A post has already performed organically. Putting money behind proven creative is the strongest move on this page.
The category rewards a recognisable face, which covers most of beauty, fitness, food and anything where the reviewer carries the claim.
You need a disclosed human endorsement rather than a presenter delivering your script.

Generate and run from your own Page when

You need several genuinely different openings this week and creator turnaround is measured in weeks.
You have a catalog large enough that one variant per product is impossible on any creator budget.
You want to find the winning claim before committing a creator fee to the wrong one.
You cannot accept a dependency where a campaign sits in pending delivery waiting on somebody else's notifications.

The sequence most teams settle into: generate cheaply to find the hook, then spend the creator budget having a real person perform the hook that already won. That way the expensive deliverable is pointed at a claim you have evidence for, rather than being the experiment.

The limits of the argument above

The pending delivery point is convenient for us, so here is where it fails

We have spent a section arguing that creator approval is an unpriced dependency in your launch plan. It is, and it is also precisely the argument a company selling generated creative would want to make. So it needs its counterweight, stated as plainly as the claim.

The approval friction is almost entirely a first time cost. Grant account level permission once, at the start of a relationship you were going to have anyway, and it never appears again. A brand with five long term partner creators and their permissions already in place experiences none of what this page warns about. Framing a one time setup step as an ongoing risk would be overstating it, and we are not going to.

The larger concession is about performance. A partnership ad works because the handle carries credibility that no amount of production value replicates. When a shopper sees a real person's name on a recommendation, they weigh it differently than a brand Page saying the same words, and that difference is not a trick we can engineer around. A generated video running from your own Page is competing on volume, iteration speed and control, not on borrowed trust. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling past the evidence.

One last honest note on the placement argument. We said a purpose built vertical cut beats a cropped square in Reels, and we believe it. But automatic placements exist because they usually do lower the cost of a given result across the whole account, and for a small advertiser with one asset and a modest budget, letting Meta distribute it everywhere is frequently the correct decision. The vertical creative case gets stronger as Reels becomes a larger share of your impressions, not before.

Who is searching this

Four teams typing "instagram reels ads", and what each one actually needs

The DTC brand with one square asset

Already running Reels ads without knowing it, because automatic placements is the default. The fix is not a new campaign, it is a vertical cut of the creative that is already working, checked in the placement preview. If producing that cut is the blocker, an Instagram ad generator removes it in an afternoon.

The influencer marketing lead

This person is negotiating whitelisting and needs to know that account level permission and post level permission are different products with the same name. Put account level permission in the contract, ask for the paid partnership label as a deliverable, and confirm the creator has a linked Facebook Page before promising Facebook delivery.

The performance marketer starved of creative

Reels eats creative faster than any other placement and this team's bottleneck is supply, not targeting. Running from the brand's own Page removes every approval dependency, and the relevant comparison is weeks against hours. The same trade shows up on Facebook ad creative.

The agency running partner media for clients

Permissions across many creators and many ad accounts is an operations problem. Keep a register of who granted account level access to which business, diary the December 1, 2026 endpoint migration if any sourcing is automated, and read how white label UGC production is priced before quoting a retainer.

Instagram Reels ads questions, answered

What are Instagram Reels ads?

Instagram Reels ads are ordinary Meta ads delivered into the Reels placement, which is a full screen vertical surface between organic Reels. There is no separate Reels campaign type. You build an ad, Reels is one of the placements it is eligible for, and what you control is whether the creative was designed vertically for that surface.

How do I run ads on Instagram Reels?

Create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager, then either leave placements on the automatic setting or select the Reels placement manually. Upload a full screen vertical video, check how it renders in the placement preview, and publish. Nothing extra needs enabling, which is why many accounts are already serving into Reels without having planned for it.

Can you run ads on Facebook Reels?

Yes. Facebook Reels is a placement in the same Ads Manager placement list as Instagram Reels, and the same ad and the same vertical creative can serve into both. If you are running a partnership ad from a creator handle, Meta states the ad will not be delivered to Facebook when there is no hard link between the Instagram account and a Facebook Page.

What are partnership ads?

Partnership ads are Meta ads that run from a creator or partner handle instead of your own Page. Meta documents them as letting you run Facebook and Instagram ads from a creator or other partner handle to expand your collaborations. They require the partner to grant permission, and they were previously called branded content ads.

What is branded content on Instagram?

Branded content on Instagram is a post where a creator has a commercial relationship with a brand and discloses it using the paid partnership label. When a brand pays to promote that content as an ad, it becomes what Meta now calls a partnership ad. The old name survives in the API, where the permission scope is still named instagram_branded_content_ads_brand.

What is ad whitelisting?

Whitelisting is the industry term for a creator granting a brand standing permission to run ads from the creator handle. On Meta it is implemented as account level permission for partnership ads. The practical difference from post level permission is that whitelisting lets you run new creative under that handle without asking again for each asset.

What is a partnership ad code?

A partnership ad code is a string the creator generates and shares so a brand can build an ad from their content. Meta documents using a partnership ad code to create an ad through the ads creation APIs. It plays the same role as the authorization code in TikTok Spark Ads, and asking for both in one message saves a round trip.

Why is my partnership ad not delivering?

The most common cause is missing creator permission. Meta states that if you publish the ad without permissions in place, it publishes the ad in a pending delivery state. The campaign looks complete and spends nothing until the creator approves the request. Check the ad level delivery status rather than assuming a published campaign is a live one.

Do I need the creator to approve before I run their Reel as an ad?

Yes. Meta documents that the creator receives a permission request from the brand which, once approved, allows the ad to be delivered. Nothing in your ad account can bypass or accelerate that step. Get the permission granted at contract stage rather than on launch day, and prefer account level permission so it only has to happen once.

What size should an Instagram Reels ad be?

Reels is a full screen vertical surface, so a purpose built vertical cut is what fits it. Meta's Instagram ads media requirements reference in the developer documentation covers the Stream, Explore and Stories placements and does not contain a Reels entry, so the authoritative check is the placement preview in Ads Manager, which renders your asset with the live interface overlays on top.

How much do Instagram Reels ads cost?

Media cost is set by the auction and by your budget, and Meta publishes no rate card, so any CPM figure you read is somebody else's account rather than a price. There is no published surcharge for the Reels placement or for the partnership ad format. Your controllable costs are creator fees and creative production.

Are partnership ads the same as TikTok Spark Ads?

They are close cousins. Both run paid media from a creator handle, both need a code or permission the creator generates, and both keep the creator identity on the ad. The differences matter: TikTok publishes fixed authorization windows of 7, 30, 60 or 365 days, while Meta does not publish an equivalent expiry, and Meta additionally supports running new creative under a partner handle.

Can I use an AI generated video as an Instagram Reels ad?

Yes. A generated vertical video is a normal video asset and runs in the Reels placement like any other. Disclose AI presenters honestly, never present a synthetic presenter as a real customer, and do not apply the paid partnership label unless a real partnership exists. Running it from your own Page keeps the whole workflow free of approval dependencies.

How do I promote a reel on Instagram?

Boosting from the app promotes an existing Reel with limited controls. Building the same thing in Ads Manager gives you the full objective, audience and placement options and is what you want for anything beyond a test. If the Reel belongs to a creator rather than your brand, it becomes a partnership ad and needs their permission first.

Should I run a partnership ad or generate my own Reels creative?

Run a partnership ad when the creator handle and their audience are what you are buying, or when a post has already performed organically. Generate your own when you need many hooks quickly, when your catalog is too large for creator budgets, or when you cannot accept an approval dependency in the launch. Most teams do both, generating to find the hook and paying a creator to perform the winner.

Make the vertical creative your Reels placement is already asking for

Paste a product page URL or your own script, pick a presenter, and get a UGC style video with voiceover and burned in captions in 9:16 for Reels, plus 1:1 and 16:9 for everywhere else. Run it from your own Page with no permission to wait on. Free to start with your account, no credit card needed.

Try the generator free See pricing

Keep reading

The TikTok equivalent