How well-known brands run their ads
Playbooks for 15 DTC, app and SaaS brands, built from up to about 240 live Meta ads each plus Google, LinkedIn and TikTok EU, pulled on October 29, 2026. Each page measures how often the brand launches new creative, which angles it scales, who the copy targets and where the clicks go, then says what to take from it.
The 15 brands side by side
| Brand | Active Meta ads | Launched in 30 days | Video | Run 90+ days | Biggest copy group | Main landing type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grüns | 631 | 95% | 67% | 1% | 27 ads | dedicated landing page |
| AG1 | 819 | 78% | 47% | 2% | 23 ads | other page |
| Liquid Death | 387 | 23% | 44% | 40% | 13 ads | short link |
| Magic Spoon | 56 | 73% | 41% | 0% | 12 ads | product page |
| Gymshark | 5,636 | 28% | 60% | 38% | 40 ads | homepage |
| Duolingo | 265 | 100% | 72% | 0% | 54 ads | app store |
| Calm | 791 | 96% | 66% | 0% | 72 ads | quiz or flow |
| Photoroom | 1,580 | 97% | 99% | 2% | 55 ads | app store |
| Headspace | 87 | 64% | 55% | 0% | 15 ads | app store |
| Notion | 201 | 51% | 47% | 4% | 175 ads | homepage |
| Canva | 2,434 | 94% | 82% | 0% | 21 ads | other page |
| HubSpot | 256 | 44% | 31% | 43% | 28 ads | dedicated landing page |
| Shopify | 3,748 | 57% | 46% | 2% | 9 ads | signup or trial |
| Grammarly | 201 | 42% | 47% | 33% | 74 ads | other page |
| monday.com | 1,047 | 16% | 51% | 57% | 36 ads | homepage |
Percentages are of the Meta ads sampled for each brand (highest reach first). Biggest copy group is the largest number of sampled ads that share one piece of copy, a sign of a message being scaled.
Patterns across the set
| Median across | Launched in 30 days | Video share | Run 90+ days | Ads in scaled copy groups |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DTC brands (5) | 73% | 47% | 2% | 74% |
| Consumer apps (4) | 96.5% | 69% | 0% | 95% |
| SaaS (6) | 47.5% | 47% | 18.5% | 77.5% |
Landing pages: 3 of 15 brands send most clicks to a other page; 3 of 15 brands send most clicks to a homepage; 3 of 15 brands send most clicks to a app store; 2 of 15 brands send most clicks to a dedicated landing page; 1 of 15 brands send most clicks to a short link; 1 of 15 brands send most clicks to a product page; 1 of 15 brands send most clicks to a quiz or flow; 1 of 15 brands send most clicks to a signup or trial.
- Creative life spans split by model. Consumer app and supplement brands rebuild their libraries fast (median ad 7 to 16 days old at Duolingo, Calm, Photoroom, Grüns, AG1, Magic Spoon and Canva), while monday.com, Gymshark, Liquid Death and HubSpot have a median ad 56 to 104 days old. Those four samples are ranked by reach, so some of that age is survivorship.
- Scale comes from copy, not ideas. In 13 of the 15 brands, 65% or more of the sampled ads share their copy with two or more other ads, and the biggest copy group is 27 to 175 ads at Grüns, Duolingo, Calm, Photoroom, Notion and Grammarly. Winners are cut many ways rather than replaced by new concepts.
- The landing page tells you the funnel. Apps send everything to a store (Duolingo, Photoroom, Headspace), supplements build noindex /pages/ funnels (Grüns, Calm's quiz.calm.com), SaaS trial brands use one free-trial page translated by market (Shopify, monday.com), and HubSpot sells gated downloads on its own offers subdomain. Several of these pages are hidden from search, so they cannot be found by searching the brand.
- Video is the biggest format at 13 of the 15 brands. HubSpot and Grammarly are the exceptions: images lead at both.
- Localization is a lever, not an afterthought: Gymshark (per-market domains), monday.com (/lang/ pages), Shopify (French, Spanish, Danish and Dutch copy), Canva (Indonesian pages) and Duolingo (Turkish, Spanish, Chinese, Thai) all run the same creative across markets.
DTC brands
Grüns ads
Grüns launches in waves around promotions, not in a steady drip: 95% of the ads we sampled are under 30 days old, 42% lead with a price, and every one lands on a purpose-built /pages/ funnel that Google is told to ignore.631 active Meta ads · 95% launched in 30 daysAG1 ads
AG1 argues with proof, not price: 26% of sampled ads lead with clinical or expert credibility, the copy is the longest in the DTC set (median 572 characters), and its newest creative is built around a new product, AG1 Pro, with a free gift as the closer.819 active Meta ads · 78% launched in 30 daysLiquid Death ads
Liquid Death's drink ads do not sell from its own store: 124 of 240 sampled ads link to a retailer-routing short link and 41 more go to Amazon, Walmart or Target, while the merch ads go to its own shop. It is also the slowest-refreshing DTC brand here (median ad 57 days old).387 active Meta ads · 23% launched in 30 daysMagic Spoon ads
Magic Spoon runs the tidiest account in the set: all 56 active ads (a complete sample) go to product pages, none is older than 48 days, and the creative that has run longest sells the bundle, not the cereal.56 active Meta ads · 73% launched in 30 daysGymshark ads
Gymshark advertises as a global brand with local shop fronts: 70 of 240 sampled ads go to a French store, 37 to the UK and 28 to the Dutch one, in the local language with a WELCOME10 code, and 81 land on a homepage rather than a product.5,636 active Meta ads · 28% launched in 30 days
Consumer apps
Duolingo ads
Duolingo runs a creative factory with a three-week life span: every one of the 211 sampled ads started in the last 30 days (median 7 days old), yet only 14 distinct pieces of copy cover all of them, and every click goes to an app store.265 active Meta ads · 100% launched in 30 daysCalm ads
Calm sends 198 of its 223 sampled ads to ad-specific quiz funnels on quiz.calm.com, one per creative family, and the whole account was rebuilt in the last two weeks: 183 launches in 14 days.791 active Meta ads · 96% launched in 30 daysPhotoroom ads
Photoroom shipped 221 video ads in a single week: 99% of the sample is video, 32 distinct pieces of copy cover 239 ads, and the only ads that have run for months are a small B2B set with a Contact us button.1,580 active Meta ads · 97% launched in 30 daysHeadspace ads
Headspace runs one tracked link for all 87 active ads (a complete sample): every ad's Sign up button goes to a Branch deep link carrying campaign, ad set and ad parameters, which resolves to a subscription page that is hidden from search.87 active Meta ads · 64% launched in 30 days
SaaS
Notion ads
Notion's Meta account is effectively one message: 175 of 201 ads (complete sample) are a single piece of copy about AI agents, and 92 ads send people to a Startups application page, with up to 3 months of the Business plan free in the offer copy.201 active Meta ads · 51% launched in 30 daysCanva ads
Canva's Meta ads are tutorials: 82% are video, 35 lead with a how-to and 17 with a free-trial push, and 48 distinct feature pages (many in Indonesian) are the landing pages, so the product demo is the creative.2,434 active Meta ads · 94% launched in 30 daysHubSpot ads
HubSpot runs a lead-gen engine, not a trial funnel: 134 of 240 sampled ads go to offers.hubspot.com gated downloads (AI prompts, social media templates) with a Download or Get offer button, and its longest-running ads are free Instagram guides.256 active Meta ads · 44% launched in 30 daysShopify ads
Shopify aims everything at one free-trial page and translates it: 107 of 210 sampled ads go to shopify.com/free-trial (including a Black Friday version), 186 ads use the Sign up button, and the two trial pages we opened are noindex, so they exist only as ad destinations.3,748 active Meta ads · 57% launched in 30 daysGrammarly ads
Grammarly is retooling its Meta creative around AI: 74 launches in the latest week (a complete sample of 201 ads) and 74 versions of one "AI writing assistant" ad, while a 161-day-old set of "mistake-free" videos keeps running under it.201 active Meta ads · 42% launched in 30 daysmonday.com ads
monday.com is the slowest-turning account in the set: the median ad is 104 days old and 57% of the sample has run 90+ days, the top creative is the same Spanish free-trial video repeated 36 times, and 113 ads simply go to the homepage.1,047 active Meta ads · 16% launched in 30 days
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Try Proxy freeFrequently asked questions
From the public ad libraries: Meta's Ad Library, Google's Ads Transparency Center, LinkedIn's Ad Library and TikTok's EU ad repository. Each playbook is a dated snapshot of what those libraries showed, measured and then read by hand.
No. The libraries only show public ads that are still active, and they have no spend data. We sample up to about 240 Meta ads per brand, ranked by reach, so launch counts are survivors and brand-new ads are likely under-counted. Each page says how many ads were sampled out of the library's own total. TikTok's library only covers the EU.
From each active ad's start date, which approximates when it launched. We count how many sampled ads started in each of the last 12 weeks. Ads that were launched and already stopped do not appear in the library's active list, so real testing volume is higher than shown.
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