Competitor Creative Teardown From Live Ad Libraries

Meta's ad library will tell you the day an ad started running and, outside political and social-issue advertising, nothing about what it cost. So longevity is the honest spend proxy: an ad still live after ninety days is being funded by somebody who can see numbers you cannot. Read across a whole category, that one signal is worth more than any swipe folder, and it is the spine of this work. What we pull: Meta's ad library for every active creative in your category, filtered to Spain and to the other markets you sell in. Google's Ads Transparency Center for search, YouTube and display, which shows formats, dates and regions per advertiser. TikTok's Creative Center. LinkedIn's ad library where the buyer is procurement or engineering. For advertising served in the EU, the Digital Services Act obliges the largest platforms to keep repositories that also state whether an ad was targeted and on what parameters, with reach — which is why a Spanish teardown yields more than the same exercise run against the United States. We use that difference deliberately. How it is classified: By claim, not by format. Counting how many competitors run vertical video answers nothing. What matters is which claims the category makes, which claims it has quietly stopped making, and which claim nobody makes because it is difficult to prove — that last group is usually where your opening is. We date the transitions: when a competitor's messaging turned from price to lead time, or from performance to warranty, and what was happening around them at that moment. What you get: A written teardown per competitor covering the claims in market, the longest-running creative and what it shares with the others that survived, the audience their targeting parameters imply where EU data exposes them, and the creative debt — executions still running that stopped working, visible when a later-dated variant took over most of the surrounding activity. Then the section that is the point of the document: which of this you should not copy, and why. Usually because the ad is carried by a brand asset, a distribution deal or a price you do not have. What we refuse: We do not deliver a folder of downloaded videos and call it research. We will not recommend replicating a specific ad, because without their cost per acquisition, replication is copying a stranger's homework without knowing the grade. And we will not run this for a buyer who wants ammunition for an argument already settled internally — the finding is usually that the category is more boring than the meeting believes, and that is not a satisfying document to carry into a board. Refresh: Category creative moves slowly in manufacturing and fast in sports and fitness, so we scope the re-run to the category rather than to a calendar. In industrial we would rather look twice a year and mean it than monthly and pad. Not for you if: You want competitor spend estimates. Nobody has them outside political advertising, and every tool selling them to you is modelling rather than observing. We will give you a defensible ranking by creative longevity and volume instead, and label it as exactly what it is. Also not for you if the competitor set is chosen by revenue rather than by who is bidding against you — those are frequently different companies, and we will say so before we start.