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[Announcement]
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[June 17, 2026]

Cannes 2026: New Ways to Turn Discovery Into Purchase on Meta


Key Takeaways

  • Affiliate Expansion: We’re expanding our Affiliate Partner program with Flipkart and Lazada and bringing Mercado Libre to more countries.
  • Live Video Ads: We’re scaling availability of Live Video Ads, helping marketers reach audiences and drive sales with live shopping streams.
  • Virtual Cards for Checkout: We are launching new virtual cards in partnership with Mastercard and Visa, enabling people to complete transactions securely without disclosing their credit card details to businesses.

AI is changing how people discover and buy products. Today, people find products inside the content they're already watching through the creators they trust and via the conversations they're having. Across Meta's apps, 3.5 billion people are experiencing this shift every day, and our AI-enabled discovery engine is what makes it possible, surfacing more relevant products and content than ever before.

Now, leading into the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, we're making more of those moments shoppable with new live video ads to drive awareness of shopping streams, expanded affiliate partnerships to help creators earn commission from tagged products, and faster checkout via virtual cards.

  • Live Video Ads: We're bringing Live Video Ads to Instagram and expanding them globally on Facebook, making it easier for businesses to promote their live videos, reach new audiences, and drive commerce across both apps. In the U.S., we're working with live commerce platforms, including CommentSold, Firework, LiveMeUp, Sprii and TalkShopLive, so sellers can turn eligible livestreams into an ad that reaches new customers.
  • Live Shopping Tools: On Facebook, marketers can use Live Shopping Tools with live video ads to create an in-stream shopping experience. Viewers can browse products, check pricing, and discover items to buy – all without leaving the live video.
  • Faster Checkout with New Virtual Cards: Starting this summer, we are rolling out a new shopping experience on Facebook and Instagram that utilizes virtual cards. This feature allows shoppers to use temporary, one-time card numbers generated from their existing Mastercard or Visa accounts. By enabling transactions without requiring the direct sharing of credit card details with businesses, this aims to enhance consumer security and increase purchase confidence.
  • New Affiliate Partners: We’re continuing to expand our Facebook affiliate partners, with Flipkart in India and Mercado Libre in Brazil and Mexico. Soon, we’ll bring Lazada to Facebook creators in Asia and Flipkart to Instagram creators in India. Creators can now connect affiliate accounts to Facebook and Instagram and add affiliate product links from these businesses directly into their content for a better consumer experience. When someone purchases a product through a creator’s post, the creator earns a commission from the affiliate partner making it easy and simple for both to benefit.
  • Add Products on Instagram: Creators in 22 countries can now add affiliate links or tag products from a business' catalog directly on Instagram. Businesses can make their catalogs discoverable for creators to search and tag, and creators can add affiliate links that direct people to specific products. When creators feature products in Reels and Feed, people discover and purchase products while browsing, and creators can earn commission through the affiliate links they share.

We’ve heard from advertisers that catalog ads perform well, but they are looking for more ways beyond product images on a white background to inspire customers and meet their brand guidelines. Today, they have to fragment campaigns where performance-driving product data like product title, price, availability, and description are only used in certain ad types.

This summer, we are changing that: product data is becoming a foundational input across all Sales campaigns, so Meta’s AI can automatically match the right products to the right people in the most effective format anytime an advertiser chooses a Sales campaign. Instead of manually choosing between different ad types, advertisers will provide both their product data and creative assets, and our ads system will assemble the best-performing ad for each viewer in real time.

Product data doesn't just enable better ads, it's also a key way to show up across Meta's growing ecosystem of shoppable experiences. When advertisers invest in their product data, they're enabling their products to surface in Meta AI Shopping mode available to US users in the Meta AI app, recommendations from Business Agents, and creator product tagging in Reels.

People are finding products in new ways, and now, purchasing can happen just as naturally. Next week at Cannes, we'll show how they connect to a broader AI system that's delivering more ROI for businesses than ever.