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

The teardown checklist
#What we examineWhat it reveals
1Creative volume and refresh rateWhether there is a real production pipeline or a one-off batch
2Concept variety versus variant countFifteen cuts of one idea is not a testing programme
3Message-to-landing-page matchThe most common and most expensive disconnect
4Offer constructionTrial length, gating, price framing – where visible
5Format mix by placementWhether creative is adapted per surface or just resized
6Longevity of individual adsLong-running ads are the closest public proxy for what works
7What is missingAbsent 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.

How to run one yourself

Nothing here requires us. Open the Ads Transparency Center, search the advertiser, and filter by region and format. Then open the Meta Ad Library and search the same brand. Export what you find, sort by how long each ad has been running, and read the ones that have survived longest – those are the ones someone decided to keep paying for.

Do it for your three closest competitors and you will learn more about your category in an afternoon than any benchmark report will tell you.

Or have us take apart your own account.

The free audit is a teardown of your advertising, except we can see the performance data as well as the creative.