Read your competitors’ ads properly, and stop guessing what to say

Marketers spend a strange amount of time inventing messaging from scratch while their competitors quietly publish the results of thousands of euros of testing, in public, where anyone can read it.

Meta runs an Ad Library that shows every ad currently running on Facebook and Instagram. TikTok, LinkedIn and Google have their own. In the European Union this is not a courtesy, it is a legal obligation under the Digital Services Act. The catch is that most people open one, scroll for five minutes, think “interesting”, and close it having learned nothing.

The problem is that they are looking at the wrong layer.

The signal almost everyone ignores

An ad library shows you what is running. It rarely shows you what is working. Those are different questions, and the second one is the only one that matters.

But there is a proxy, and it is reliable: how long the ad has been live.

Nobody keeps paying to run an ad that loses money. A creative that has been running for six weeks has survived six weeks of somebody looking at a cost-per-acquisition number and deciding not to switch it off. An ad that appeared four days ago is a test, and most tests fail.

So when you open a competitor’s ads, sort them in your head by start date and ignore everything recent. What is left is their proven set, and it is usually much smaller than the total. A brand running forty ads often has four that have been live for months and thirty-six that will be gone by the end of the quarter.

Those four are the ones to read.

Read the argument, not the picture

Here is where most competitive research goes wrong. Someone sees a competitor’s ad with a split-screen before-and-after and a yellow arrow, and concludes that they should make a split-screen with a yellow arrow.

The format is the least transferable part. It works for them because of their product, their audience and their brand. What transfers is the argument: the reason the ad gives someone to care.

For each surviving ad, write down four things in a single line each.

1. The problem it opens on. Not the product, the discomfort. “Your inbox is full of the same three questions.”
2. Who it is talking to. Often visible in the first five words. An ad that opens “Agency owners:” has told you its targeting.
3. The promise. What life looks like afterwards, in their words, not yours.
4. The objection it pre-empts. Price, effort, switching cost, trust. Look for the sentence that exists only to defuse something.

Do that for the surviving ads of four or five competitors and something obvious happens. The same three or four arguments appear over and over, in different clothes. That repetition is not laziness. It is the market telling you which arguments survive contact with real money.

The gap is worth more than the pattern

Once you have the list of arguments everyone is using, the interesting question is the one nobody asks: what is missing?

If every competitor in your category leads on speed, then speed is table stakes and an ad about speed will be judged against people who have spent a year optimising that exact claim. You will lose that fight on budget.

But if nobody is talking about what happens after the purchase, or about the thing your customers actually complain about in reviews, you have a lane with no traffic in it. That lane is often visible in one place: your own support inbox and their public reviews. The gap between what customers complain about and what the category advertises is where new angles live.

A one-hour session

Set a timer. This is research, and research expands to fill whatever time you give it.

You will not leave with a campaign. You will leave with three hooks that are grounded in what the market has already paid to validate, which is a considerably better starting point than a blank document at nine in the morning.

What the libraries will not tell you

Be honest about the limits, because people build strategies on things ad libraries do not actually contain.

You cannot see spend, impressions or click-through rate for a commercial ad. Nobody outside the advertiser can, and any tool claiming otherwise is estimating. You cannot see the landing page performance, which is where half the campaign actually lives. And you cannot see what they tried and killed last year, only what is running now.

What you can see, reliably, is what a competitor is willing to keep paying for today. For the price of an hour, that is an unreasonable amount of information.

Questions people ask about this

Is it legal to look at competitors’ ads?

Yes. The libraries exist precisely so that anyone can. In the EU, transparency for commercial advertising is a requirement of the Digital Services Act, not an option the platforms chose.

Is copying an angle stealing?

Copying a creative, a slogan or a brand asset is. Noticing that everyone in your category leads on the same problem is competitive awareness, and running the same argument in your own words with your own proof is how every market has always worked.

How often should I do this?

Once a quarter is enough for the landscape. Once a month if a serious competitor has just raised money or launched something, because that is when their messaging moves.

I am a small brand with no ad budget. Is this still useful?

More useful, not less. You are reading the results of other people’s testing without paying for it, and the angles work in organic posts, in email subject lines and on your home page just as well as in an ad.