Dive into the Meta (Facebook) Partner ecosystem with Alon Levin

I’m a partner manager on the EMEA Meta Business Partners (MBP) team. It used to be FMP as in Facebook Marketing Partners and now it’s MBP. We manage the relationship with our business partners. We’re talking about companies who built tools to buy media on our family of apps like Facebook, Instagram etc. more efficiently, creative partners who help advertisers to generate better creative assets for their campaigns like videos or images and signals partners who handle measurements and gathering signals for the advertisers. We also have commerce partners like Shopify, WooCommerce and other ecommerce platforms.

My team works with these partners globally. Our job is to make sure they are aligned with Meta’s goals and priorities and also to support them with their growth. As we put the advertiser in the center, we work with partners to make sure our advertisers are getting added value and that there’s a good synergy between Meta and the ecosystem. At Meta we usually focus on horizontal solutions but if you look at companies like Smartly, you’ll see that they are focused on disruptors, retailers, e-commerce and travel clients and they have built better verticalized solutions for these clients. They also provide support at a level that we can’t always meet.

Additionally to that, I work on new internal products and solutions to scale our work and ship more love to the ecosystem.

I’m the partner’s main point of contact at Meta, and my job is to be their Meta insider. I’m putting them in front of our product or business teams when needed and advocate internally for their needs. This works both ways because, for example, sometimes we would need the partners’ help to push the adoption of a new product. Partners also help us get feedback from the market because in some cases they have additional touchpoints with clients. I aim to have alignment on our mutual goals and always try to add value for advertisers. In many ways I see partners as an important extension of Meta.

Partners are a critical part of our strategy and our growth. Our biggest spenders are looking for a better way to automate and scale their media buying on Meta, so they turn to partners’ technology to do that. When you think about small, long-tail advertisers, some of them find our platform too complicated and they use partners who specialize in SMBs and provide simplified tools to purchase media on Meta. Partners can really serve both ends of the sophistication bandwidth of advertisers.

We value our ecosystem and we invest a lot in it because we want to make sure that our partners are aligned with our vision and our advertisers’ goals and priorities. For example, we share our product roadmap in advance. We share what we are going to build with partners because we want them to build products that are complementary to ours, not to replicate what we are building. If we go back in time to 2013, Meta, then Facebook, used to offer only a very buggy ads manager and Power Editor. So partners were building better tools only for the basic media buying, optimization, ways to lower your budgets or increase your bids based on your performance etc.. These specific tools are not needed anymore, because the optimization that Meta offers right out of the box is amazing. So we try to get our partners to add value on top of that, to help advertisers create better creatives, or help them integrate better with our tools and to uncover and solve new needs in the market.

Focus and resources. People look at Meta and they think that we can do everything, which isn’t true. It’s not just us, you see it with Google, TikTok and other publishers, they all rely on an ecosystem of partners. In many cases partners are not only providing products and technology, they also provide our advertisers with a critical layer of strategy, service and support, things that are really important to both big and small advertisers.

Giving APIs to partners enables them to build different workflows and different media buying flows. An advertiser may prefer what Smartly provides, and another would prefer what ROI Hunter does because these products solve the same problem differently. Some of the partners give you more insights than data, and some of them give you data instead of insights. I think that it’s great to have such a diverse ecosystem with so many tools and technologies for advertisers to choose from.

I can talk a bit about the partners I manage. Smartly is doing an amazing job helping advertisers to scale, providing top notch tools to help them spend more wisely. ROI Hunter, which is also a Google partner, is offering a great way to use your signals from Google Analytics to affect your campaigns on Meta in a highly effective way and they bring a lot of value to our e-commerce advertisers.

Creative insights is also top of mind for us and our advertisers. Smartly recently acquired ViralSpace, a company in that space. We have creative partners like TheSource, VidMob and others who are providing outstanding solutions for the creative needs of Advertisers. They are even building predictive tools for advertisers to identify the best performing creatives even before they are used in campaigns. We have partners like GRIP who are doing incredible things with 3D, like generating multiple versions of the same product image in different languages, backgrounds etc. GRIP can take a photo of a beer bottle, change the label on the bottle to any other design and save the brand or agency the need of taking photos of every bottle version.

One of the things that we try to do on the partnerships team is to remove all roadblocks for partners and allow them to innovate. They can come to us and say: “hey, we have this idea, and if you enable this API on your end, or if you develop this or that, we’ll be able to develop a new product on our end” — and if it makes sense we do it, because eventually it gives value to the advertisers and to our ecosystem.

We’re trying to be as transparent as possible. We want our partners to build products that are complementary to what we build so they won’t waste time overlapping our products. Personally, I’ve been there. In my days as a Facebook partner, I developed a product and then Facebook released the same thing six months later. As a startup, the time of your engineers is one of the most expensive resources you have, and investing months of development in something that Meta is going to launch for free a bit later, can really impact your bottom line.

What we’re trying to do with all of our partners right now is to improve our communication, to share more and to make sure that everyone who is working with Meta can make informed decisions.

Yes, we organise partner summits as an open event where everyone can join where we tell people where we are going. We do that even if it is too early for partners to build anything. Take the Metaverse for instance: partners can brainstorm and think how they would build on top of it once it becomes a reality. You can try to think about the future of the industry and where everything is going.