Research
Brand Adoption Hit a New High in September as Creators Fronting Boosts Rose 33%
Brand adoption reached 176 on the index in September and creators fronting at least one boost rose 33% on August. 39% of boosted reach still ran with no public trace.
September's EU picture from the Paid Partnership Report: ad volume fell 23% and reach held close to flat at −2%, while brand adoption and the creator pool both climbed to their highest levels of the year.
Brand adoption and the creator pool reached the year's highs
Brand adoption rose 14% from August to 176 on the index, 76% above January. That's above June and July's 174 and the highest reading of the year.
Creators fronting at least one boosted partnership ad
Indexed to January 2026, January–September
EU-27, Meta. January = 100. Same methodology as the report.
Creators fronting at least one boost rose 33% from August, the most in any month this year and 74% above January. Fewer ads are carrying more: average reach per ad is up 53% on January.
Creators' own pages ran September's two biggest dark boosts
39% of boosted reach ran with no public trace in September, up from 37% in August. Those ads left no post on any profile, so monitoring tools that read creator feeds had nothing to find.
September's boosted partnership ads: dark vs public
Share of ads with no matching public post
EU-27, Meta. Same methodology as the report.
The month's two biggest dark ads came from creators' own pages. Sara (@saraelisa.an), a sourdough and everyday-recipe creator with 112k followers, reached 11M people on a modeled €46–69k, and creator Giulia Andrea Gaudino (609k followers) reached 10.7M on a modeled €18–27k. Google ran the third-biggest dark ad, 7.8M reach on a modeled €32–48k behind a creator account.
Hashim Musa's own page ran the biggest public boost
The month's biggest public boost also came from a creator's own page. Creator Hashim Musa (3.5M followers) boosted his Zalando partnership to 10.6M people on a modeled €21–32k, with a matching, labeled post on the profile.
Football carried the next tier. Mastercard's partnership ad with Leo Messi (517.7M followers) reached 8.8M on a modeled €36–54k, and Samsung ran Spain international Alexia Putellas (3.8M followers) in the open for 7.7M on a modeled €15–23k. Neutrogena reached 7.9M with pharmacist and women's-health creator Marta Masi (251k followers) on a modeled €15–23k.
Country spotlight: Belgium
Belgium took 1% of EU boosted-partnership reach in September. 43% of that reach was dark, above the EU's 39%, and 79% of the ads had no public post.
Coffee and chocolate boosted in the open. Côte d'Or ran Belgium's biggest public boost, 855k reached with an 8.6k-follower creator on a modeled €3–5k. Douwe Egberts Belgium reached 2.2M from 4 ads, 0% of the reach dark, led by a 14k-follower creator at 774k, and Senseo reached 678k with a 17k-follower baking creator.
Where these numbers come from
Every Meta ad marked as a paid partnership, across all 27 EU countries. Reach is adjusted for how long each ad ran inside the month. Spend is a model built from reach breakdowns and CPM benchmarks, shown as a range. The per-country detail – top public and dark boosts, brand rankings, the creators behind them – is in the report, free per country.
See the full picture
Media intelligence across the entire creator economy – every partnership, boost, and mention.
