Meet the 2026 Meta Agency Award Winners

Code3

2026 winners for

Brand Campaign of the Year with Christian Dior Couture

Performance Campaign of the Year with Christian Dior Couture

Creative Excellence Campaign of the Year with Feastables

Code3 won three awards this year for three campaigns focused on very different things:

Expanding the audience of a runway show. Dior's Cruise 2027 show in Los Angeles was invitation only, but knowing that a lot of people would be interested, Code3 and Dior wanted to expand the audience with an Instagram livestream. In the run-up, Code3 used two products together to help make this a reality.

The first, Moment Maker, puts a brand in front of a lot of people in a short burst, which built the buzz. The second, Reminder Ads, lets someone tap once to get a notification the moment the show starts, which turned that buzz into people who had actually committed to tune in. After the collection debuted, Lead Ads gave interested viewers a simple way to provide their details and hear more.

• 267% more people signed up for a reminder than Dior had aimed for, and each signup cost 24% less than at previous Dior shows.
• An 11-point lift in how many people remembered seeing the ads, and an 11.8-point lift in how many said they wanted to own Dior.

"Dior and Code3 shared an ambition to rethink what a fashion show could become on social. Embracing Meta’s newest products allowed us to extend a two-hour runway moment into sustained cultural relevance and measurable consumer engagement."

Ashton Hall, Head of Paid Social, Code3

Winning the holidays. Like many in the luxury industry, holiday is Dior's largest commercial moment, and the goal of the campaign was straightforward: sell more than last year without spending more to do it.

Code3's theory was that the way to do this didn’t actually involve budget or the ads themselves. It was all about account structure. Over the years, the holiday campaign has been split amongst many separate campaigns, each with its own audience and its own goal, and they had started competing with one another for the same shoppers.

Over eight weeks, Code3 partnered with Dior to rebuild the structure. Several of those campaigns were combined into one using Advantage+ Shopping, Code3 also set up the ad account to favor shoppers likely to spend more and connected Dior's CRM information to power this, so it could learn from real purchases rather than guesses.

• Dior made 59% more back on every dollar it spent than the year before, and the cost of making a sale fell 41%.
• Nearly four times as many people watched Dior's videos to completion.
• It worked well enough that Dior has now implemented this set up for future campaigns.

Introducing a snack brand to the people buying the groceries. Feastables already had a large online following, but it had never run advertising. To grow, it needed to introduce itself to the household shoppers filling the cart, and it had no advertising history with that audience to draw on.

Since it was unclear what the top selling point would be, Code3 tested one messaging element at a time. Each round of ads made a single case for the brand: clean-label ingredients, ethical sourcing, nutrition, how it stacks up against older brands, and real families eating it.

Meta's creative testing tools then showed which of those messaging points actually changed how shoppers felt about Feastables. Clean-label ingredients won, beating other angles everyone had expected, and Code3 put the budget behind it right away.

• A 23.9-point lift in how many people remembered seeing the ads.
• 45.5% more people clicked through, and each click cost 20.6% less.
• More than a million shoppers engaged with the ads and can be reached again, and Feastables tripled its budget within three months.

"We learned as much from the creatives that didn't perform as we did from the winners. Meta's creative testing tools helped us understand why creative resonated, not just which ads performed."

Craig Atkinson, Chief Executive Officer, Code3

Ovative Group

2026 winners for

Creator Campaign of the Year with American Eagle

Best Use of Business Messaging with Boost Mobile

Letting the creators do the talking. American Eagle wanted to show up with Gen Z without looking like it was selling to them, which is a group that spots that instantly. Ovative worked with creators who were Gen Z themselves, with smaller followings rather than celebrity ones, and asked them to post around real moments like spring break and first-week-of-class outfits. The result looked like campus life instead of a jeans ad.

Each post went up on the creator's own account first and had to earn an audience on its own. Only then did Ovative put money behind the ones that worked, using Partnership Ads to run the creator's post as an ad from the creator's own handle rather than the brand's. That was only possible because Ovative had secured the rights to every piece of content up front.

• 18% of people who saw the paid creator posts interacted with them, more than three times the usual rate.
• 16% kept watching past the opening seconds, again more than three times the norm.
• A 22-point lift in how favorably people viewed American Eagle, nearly four times the typical result for a retailer.

"By letting creator content live organically first, then scaling it via Meta Partnership Ads, we earned credibility before we ever paid for reach. That structure now powers AE’s creator program through Summer and beyond."

Lisa Miller, Manager, Paid Social, Ovative Group

Starting conversations instead of running ads. Boost Mobile sells budget wireless plans, and many of the people it wants to reach are mobile-first, price-conscious and Spanish-speaking. Feed ads alone weren't getting there. Choosing a phone plan comes with real questions, and people wanted somewhere to ask them.

So Ovative built the campaign around Click-to-WhatsApp ads, which let someone tap an ad and land in a WhatsApp chat with the business. Ovative ran the ads in Spanish and English side by side, each with its own creative, so they could see which was working harder.

Along with setting the strategy, the other part of the job was proving it was worth doing. A new channel is easy to give credit it hasn't earned, so Ovative ran incrementality tests to see how much of this audience no other Boost campaign had reached, and used Meta's modeling to separate the purchases the campaign genuinely created from the ones it simply got credit for.

• 11,428 conversations started, at $16.72 each.
• 447K people reached who no other Boost campaign on Meta had touched, 248K of them Spanish-speaking.
• A 17.6-point lift in how many people remembered the ads, three times the telecom norm.
• The Spanish-language ads reached people at roughly half the cost of the English ones, and started more than four times as many conversations.

Net Conversion

2026 winners for

Best Use of Data and Signals with Winn-Dixie

Fresh off its January 2026 rebrand, The Winn-Dixie Company was focused on turning renewed brand momentum into measurable customer growth. The goal was clear: reach high-value shoppers and inspire more of them to visit Winn-Dixie stores.

Net Conversion implemented Meta’s Conversions API to create a direct server-to-server connection. By feeding reliable, real-time in-store conversion data back to Meta Ads Manager, they shifted the campaign focus from web clicks to server-verified store trips. This gave the team a clearer view of how digital advertising influenced store visits and allowed campaigns to optimize toward the business outcome that mattered most: bringing customers through the doors.

The result: a 44% reduction in the cost of driving a high-value shopper to a Winn-Dixie store.

"By pairing rich consumer insights with Meta’s precision automation tools, we transformed renewed brand interest into measurable store traffic. By pushing our strategy to combine dynamic local utility with full-funnel creative, we proved that hyper-personalization at scale is the fastest path to driving real-world business outcomes."

Alexia George, Senior Marketing Manager, Net Conversion

Havas Media Network

2026 winners for

Best Use of Automation: National Association of REALTORS®

NAR and Havas Media Network developed an Advantage+ Audience campaign on Meta to identify people most likely to be considering a home purchase. The team tested this approach against NAR's traditional audience strategy to see whether automation could help the campaign reach more people and deliver stronger results. The team compared website visits and advertising costs across both approaches. Independent research firm DISQO measured whether the campaign influenced consumers' consideration of and intent to work with a REALTOR®.

• More people visited NAR's website while the campaign spent 25% less
• The cost of each website visit was 29% lower, and the campaign reached people for 18% less
• Consideration of working with a REALTOR® increased by 8 point, and iIntent to use a REALTOR® increased by 9 points
• Consumer consideration was four times higher than the previous year

“The opportunity with automation is giving teams the ability to respond to what audiences are telling us in real time. With NAR, that meant moving beyond predefined audience assumptions and using live signals to make smarter decisions throughout the campaign. The result was a more responsive media strategy that delivered stronger performance and brand impact.”

Holly Dunn, Head of Investment & Activation, Havas Media Network North America.

elk Marketing

2026 winners for

Performance Campaign of the Year by a Boutique Agency with Compartés

Compartés is a Los Angeles chocolate maker and like many businesses, November and December are the most important time of the year. Going into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the brand set an ambitious goal to nearly double the ad spend compared to the same nine days a year earlier, but maintain the goal of returning four dollars in sales for every dollar spent on ads.

Typically, when ad spend meaningfully goes up, it can be difficult to maintain the same efficiency, so elk's answer was to give Meta more ads to choose from. They enabled Meta's Advantage suite to handle about 87% of the budget and let the ads run anywhere across Facebook and Instagram.

This approach only works if the ads system has a variety of different ads to pick from, so elk created a consistent flow of different types of ads: creator videos, holiday photography, animated graphics, and ads built from the product catalog. They launched them in rounds, so they could see which idea was carrying the season and build the next one from it. Budget rose 10 to 20% at a time, and only while returns held.

• Over the nine days around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Compartés spent 99% more than the year before and made 105% more from it, with each purchase costing 9.8% less.
• $2.8M in sales and 21,000+ orders over the eight weeks, up 33.1% and 32.1% respectively.
• 42.1% more orders from first-time buyers, shifting the campaign from hitting mostly repeat customers to mostly new ones.

"Black Friday was the proof point. We increased Meta spend 99% and improved ROAS, cost per purchase and CPM. Firm budget and efficiency guardrails gave us the confidence to scale when the account was ready."

James Dupre, VP of Paid Media, elk Marketing

Congratulations to this year's winners

Congratulations to Code3, Ovative Group, Net Conversion, Havas Media Network and elk Marketing. We can't wait to see what ends up being submitted next year.