NEW YORK, NY. September 22nd, 2026 – Ovative Group has won two categories at Meta’s 2026 Agency Awards: Creator Campaign of the Year for its work with American Eagle, and Best Use of Business Messaging for its work with Boost Mobile. The wins were announced at Meta’s Agency Summit in New York.
“A creator program for a retail brand and a new acquisition channel for a wireless carrier look nothing alike on paper. What they shared was the same starting point: understanding what our clients’ businesses actually needed before deciding how Meta fit in,” said Andy Pierce, VP of Paid Social at Ovative.
The double win recognizes Ovative’s work across two distinct challenges: building a scalable, always-on creator program for a national retail brand, and pioneering a new acquisition channel for a value-focused wireless carrier. In both cases, a commitment to understanding client business needs led to strategic solutions that drove real business impact.
Best Creator Campaign 2026
American Eagle came to Ovative looking for an authentic way to connect with Gen Z culture, an audience that can spot an insincere brand play a mile away. Ovative built a creator program centered on nano- to mid-sized, Instagram-first creators whose content already reflected campus culture and everyday Gen Z routines, then secured full paid usage rights so top-performing content could be amplified across Meta via Meta Partnership Ads.
Content ran organically first, building engagement and trust before media spend followed, then scaled through Meta’s awareness and consideration campaign structures. The program was built to be repeatable rather than a one-off push, leveraging a maintained roster of creators, two-week creative flights, and a graduation path for top performers into always-on campaigns.
Measured impact:
- 23 organic posts from 14 creators drove millions of views and an engagement rate more than 5x higher than the previous season.
- 21 paid creator posts generated 194K clicks and an engagement rate 237% higher than benchmark.
- A Meta Brand Lift Study confirmed the impact to brand favorability with a +22-point lift
The program has since extended from Spring into Summer campaigns, and into Holiday planning.
Best Use of Business Messaging 2026
Boost Mobile needed a way to reach budget-conscious, mobile-first consumers, many of them Spanish-speaking, in a market where standard in-feed and video formats were losing their edge. Ovative and Meta proposed a Click-to-WhatsApp (CTWA) campaign, one of the first tests of the format in Telecom, pairing Meta’s targeting with WhatsApp’s native, conversational experience.
The campaign ran with parallel Spanish- and English-language ad sets built for direct performance comparison, alongside a concurrent Meta Brand Lift Study to measure impact beyond the click.
Measured impact:
- Diversifying language paid off, with Spanish-language campaigns delivering lower CPMs, and higher incremental purchase rate.
- The Brand Lift Study quantified a 17.6-point lift in Standard Ad Recall, 3 times the Telecom industry benchmark for media.
This impact has led to Boost Mobile is continuing to invest in WhatsApp beyond the initial campaign, becoming a consistent part of their playbook in more recent campaigns.
Ovative’s two wins in 2026 build on their win in 2025, where it was selected for Best Use of Data and Signals for its work with Polaris.
View the full list of 2026 Meta Agency Award winners here.
About Ovative Group
Ovative Group is an independent, full-funnel media, measurement, and creative firm. Leveraging deep industry expertise, Ovative’s brands like Polaris, Boost Mobile, Post Consumer Brands, American Eagle Outfitters, Petco, and UnitedHealth Group transform their media, measurement, and creative programs. The result is profitable growth that speaks for itself.
At Ovative, we don’t just track data, we redefine success. Our proprietary marketing intelligence platform, EMRge™ helps businesses transform marketing into a driver of sustainable growth. Powered by Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR), our unique approach to holistic media buying, planning, and measurement, EMRge™ is the first marketing intelligence platform to measure businesses holistically. We’re all about raising the bar every day, and it shows. Our work has been recognized by organizations like AdWeek, Digiday, Google, Meta, Inc. 5000, and USA Today. For more information about Ovative, visit our website or follow Ovative on Instagram or LinkedIn.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Courtney Stoesz
Sr. Manager of Brand Marketing and Events
[email protected]
715-307-2255
