Other people's advertising, taken apart

Why we do this instead of publishing case studies

We cannot show you our own client numbers. Every account is under a confidentiality agreement signed without a publication clause, and inventing impressive percentages is what we would be criticising if someone else did it.

So we work in public on companies who are not our clients. It demonstrates the same thing a case study would – how we think, what we notice, what we would change – on material anyone can go and verify.

Where the material comes from

Both major platforms are legally required to publish what advertisers run. Google's Ads Transparency Center shows every ad an advertiser is running, by format and region. Meta's Ad Library shows the same for Facebook and Instagram, with dates. Between them you can reconstruct a competitor's creative strategy without any special access at all.

What you cannot see is spend, performance, or targeting. So a teardown is a reading of strategy and craft, not of results. We say so in every one, because the alternative – asserting what worked based on what is visible – is the most common failure of this genre.

What we look at, in order

#	What we examine	What it reveals
1	Creative volume and refresh rate	Whether there is a real production pipeline or a one-off batch
2	Concept variety versus variant count	Fifteen cuts of one idea is not a testing programme
3	Message-to-landing-page match	The most common and most expensive disconnect
4	Offer construction	Trial length, gating, price framing – where visible
5	Format mix by placement	Whether creative is adapted per surface or just resized
6	Longevity of individual ads	Long-running ads are the closest public proxy for what works
7	What is missing	Absent formats and untouched surfaces are usually the real finding

The rules we hold ourselves to

We never claim to know performance. We do not pretend a competitor is failing to make a point. We name what we would do differently and why, so the reasoning is checkable. And if a company we take apart wants a right of reply, they get one on the same page.