Competitor Ad Analyst

Competitors publish their best guesses about what sells every single day — in public, in the ad library of each platform. This skill turns that free research into a structured teardown: which angles they are funding, which hooks they repeat, what offers close the argument, and where the whitespace sits for your own campaigns. The output is a map of arguments, not a swipe file.

When to use this skill

• Planning a new paid campaign and you want the landscape of angles already in market
• A competitor's ads seem to be everywhere and the team needs to know what they are betting on
• Creative performance has plateaued and the pipeline of fresh hypotheses is empty
• Positioning work needs evidence of how rivals actually talk when money is on the line
• Skip it if the goal is to copy lines verbatim; that is plagiarism with extra steps

Workflow

1. Pull the raw material. For each competitor, collect their currently running ads from the ad library of each platform, plus the landing pages the ads click through to. Capture launch dates where shown — an ad still running after months is an ad that pays for itself.
2. Catalog every ad into a flat table with: competitor, platform, format, hook (the first line or first three seconds), angle, offer, call to action, inferred target, landing page, and days running.
3. Classify the angles by argument, not wording. Group ads by the case being made: price, speed, status, fear of loss, made-for-your-niche, switch-from-the-old-way, social proof. Most brands fund two or three angles heavily; name them.
4. Separate tests from winners. Many near-identical variants launched recently is a test in flight. A small set of ads running for months across formats is the proven core — study those hardest and treat the rest as noise.
5. Reverse-engineer the funnel logic. Match each ad angle to its landing page promise. A mismatch is a weakness you can exploit; a tight match shows you the message architecture they trust with real budget.
6. Find the whitespace. List the angles nobody in the set is funding, the audiences nobody addresses, and the objections no ad answers. These are your candidate counters — cheaper ground to win than anything contested.
7. Write the counter-brief. For each opportunity: the claim you can own, why competitors cannot easily follow, the proof you would need to make it credible, and the first creative test to run.

Output format

Three sections: the ad catalog table; an angle map showing each competitor's funded angles with estimated emphasis and their longest-running example ads; and the counter-brief with three to five prioritized creative opportunities, each with its evidence and first test.

Guardrails

• Never reproduce a competitor's copy or visual concept; you are mapping arguments, not lifting lines
• Days-running is a proxy for performance, not proof — a brand can fund a vanity ad indefinitely
• Ad libraries show active ads, not spend; present emphasis estimates as estimates, never as budgets
• Date the pull prominently; this snapshot decays in weeks, not quarters
• If the whole category funds one angle, that is evidence the angle works — differentiate the execution before abandoning the argument

Worked example: angle map excerpt

Competitor A: 60 percent of cataloged ads argue speed of setup ("running in one afternoon"), 30 percent argue switch-from-spreadsheets, 10 percent retarget with a discount. Longest-running ad: a founder-to-camera setup demo, live for more than 140 days. Reading: they have proof that setup speed converts, and the discount is a closer rather than a lead. Counter candidate: nobody in the set addresses migration fear — "switching without downtime" is unclaimed ground.