How to write a creative brief from competitor ads

Most creative briefs are written from a blank page and a client's opinion, and then the competitor ads get pasted in at the end as "references". Flip it. If you write a creative brief from competitor ads first, the brief inherits a market's worth of evidence instead of one person's taste. Here is the workflow, start to finish, with a skeleton you can copy.

How do you write a creative brief from competitor ads?

You write it in six steps: pick competitors, collect their live ads, tag each ad, find the repeated patterns, fill the brief fields from those patterns, and mark what you will not copy.

1. Pick 3 to 5 competitors. Include one adjacent brand that sells to the same person.
2. Collect 10 to 20 live ads per competitor. Free libraries first; Proxy if you want it fast.
3. Tag every ad by hook, angle, offer, format, days running and variations.
4. Find what repeats. Three ads, or two competitors, saying the same thing is a pattern.
5. Fill the brief from the patterns: audience, proposition, proof, mandatories, tone, formats.
6. Write a "do not copy" list, so your work lands next to the market and not on top of it.

Why bother? Because the brief is where creative gets decided. Per Nielsen's 2017 write-up, Project Apollo found that 65% of a brand's sales lift from advertising came from the creative (a 2006 finding, and the same article notes media's share had grown to 36% from 15%). Old data, but the direction holds: the creative is where the lift comes from, so it deserves a brief built on evidence.

How many competitor ads do you need to pull?

Pull 10 to 20 live ads per competitor, across 3 to 5 competitors. Fewer than 10 per brand and you are reading one campaign; past 20 you are tagging for the sake of it.

This is the research step most brief guides skip. The popular ones treat competitive context as one box in the template (according to Flighted's own page, its Facebook brief guide starts its process at objectives and KPIs and lists competitive context as one of eight components). Fine for a template. Not enough when the brief is supposed to be about what the market is already saying.

The free route

Every platform publishes its own library, and all of them are free:

• Meta: the Meta Ad Library lets you search all active ads running across Meta products. Our guide to how to see competitors' Facebook ads walks through it.
• Google: the Ads Transparency Center is a searchable repository of advertisers and the ads they've served, filterable by date and location. See the Google Ads Transparency Center guide.
• LinkedIn: the LinkedIn Ad Library, covered in how to see competitors' LinkedIn ads.
• TikTok: EU-delivered ads only, found by advertiser name. See the TikTok ad library guide.

The cost is time.

You scroll, screenshot, and copy start dates into a sheet by hand, one ad at a time.

The fast route with Proxy

Proxy is a free MCP server that lets ChatGPT or Claude read those same libraries live (Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok EU ads, the last by exact advertiser name). You ask once instead of scrolling:

"Pull 15 active Meta ads and 10 Google ads for each of these three brands. For every ad, give me the headline or first line, the format, and the date it started running."

Data from our own Notion test showed that five tool calls and 5 credits returned 25 Meta ads (15 image, 7 carousel, 3 video, the oldest started 2026-05-21) and 25 Google ads (11 text, 10 video, 4 image, the oldest first shown 2026-04-29). One catch worth knowing: the top-ranked, verified Meta result for "Notion" was an unrelated London magazine, and the real account was the second candidate. Proxy returns ranked candidates for exactly that reason; still, check the page name before you tag anything.

Each ad-library call costs 1 credit and the free tier gives you 20 credits a day with no card, so a small pull fits in a day. Setup is on the install page. For the longer version of this workflow, see seeing competitor ads in ChatGPT and Claude.

What should you tag on every ad?

Tag six things per ad: hook, angle, offer, format, days running and variations. Put one ad per row in a sheet (or ask your assistant to build the table) so patterns become countable.

Field	What you write	Where it comes from
Hook	The first line of copy, or the first three seconds of a video, word for word	Ad copy; video transcript
Angle	The reason to buy, in 2 to 4 words (price, speed, status, proof, ease)	Your read of the ad
Offer	What the viewer gets and the call to action (free trial, 20% off, demo)	Ad copy, button, landing page
Format	Image, video, carousel, or text	The library
Days running	Today minus the start date	Meta start date; Google first and last shown
Variations	How many versions of the same message you can see	Count the near-duplicates

Two notes on the fiddly ones. For video, tag the hook from the transcript, not from memory. Ask your assistant to transcribe each video ad (1 credit per video in Proxy). And keep hook apart from angle: the hook is the line that stops the scroll, the angle is the reason the line works. "Still paying full price for software?" is a hook; "price" is the angle.

If you want the research side before this tagging step, our guide to spying on competitors' ads covers it.

How do you find the patterns, and what does run length tell you?

Count what repeats. A pattern is anything that shows up in three or more ads, or in two or more competitors. Everything else is a one-off.

Do three passes over your sheet:

1. Count by field. How many ads open with a question? How many lead with a price? Which angle appears across competitors, and which in only one?
2. Compare the longest-running third with the newest third. What do the old ads share that the new ones don't? A format, an offer, a specific proof point?
3. Look for the gap. An angle nobody uses is either a trap or an opening. Note it and decide later.

Run length deserves care. Marketers often say long-running ads are winners, because nobody keeps paying for a loser. That is a reasonable inference; it is not proof. The libraries show you the creative, the copy and the dates. For ordinary commercial ads we found no spend or results fields. Meta's page says it adds spend, reach and funding entities for ads about social issues, elections or politics, and according to Google, its Ads Transparency Center shows advertiser name, location and payer, with no spend field. An ad can run for months because it works, because it is cheap to leave on, or because nobody turned it off.

So write patterns with their confidence attached. "84 of the 100 live Meta ads we pulled for Notion share one headline, and 65 of the 100 have run for 60 days or more" is a strong note: it is a count you can check. "Airtable has run its Claude connector ads since early May, so they work" is not, because a long run is an inference, not a result. The first style goes in the brief. (Counts from our own pull on 2026-10-25; yours come from your own sheet.)

How do you fill the brief from those patterns?

You fill each brief field with a decision, backed by one pattern from your sheet. Keep it to a page. The Design Business Association says a strong brief centres on one core message and shouldn't turn into an essay.

Audience

Name the one person the ads are talking to, using what the competitors' hooks assume about them. If three rivals open with "tired of..." the market has decided the audience is frustrated with something. Write that frustration down.

Single-minded proposition

One sentence: the one thing the ad must make the viewer believe. Per Launchcodex, a performance brief should carry one creative angle among its nine areas. Choose the angle your sheet shows is crowded and long-running, or the angle that is empty and true for the client. Say which, and why.

Proof

List the evidence the client can honestly show: numbers, reviews, demos, guarantees. Check what rivals use as proof. If every competitor leans on star ratings, a specific customer result may stand out.

Mandatories

Legal lines, brand assets, required claims, the landing page, the call to action. This is the part a designer can't guess (and will, if you let them), so write it plainly.

Tone

Describe it in a sentence and name one competitor ad at each end: "warmer than Competitor A, less jokey than Competitor C."

Formats

Use your format counts. If most of what the market runs is static image and almost none is video, that is a decision to make on purpose, not a default. Add the placement specs production needs.

What to avoid copying

Write down what you saw and will not do: their exact headline and offer wording, their imagery, their claims. This list is the guardrail between research and imitation, and it deserves its own heading in the brief.

What does a copy-paste brief skeleton look like?

Copy this into a doc and fill each line from your pattern sheet. Delete any line you can't back with evidence.

Creative brief: [client or campaign]

• Objective: [one business outcome, with the number]
• Audience: [one person, one frustration or desire]
• Single-minded proposition: [one sentence]
• Why we believe it (proof): [2 to 3 facts the client can show]
• What the market is saying: [3 to 5 patterns, each as "seen in X of Y ads" plus confidence]
• The gap we can own: [an angle or offer nobody is using]
• Hook directions: [3 hooks, each tied to a pattern]
• Offer and call to action: [exact wording, destination]
• Tone: [one sentence plus two reference ads]
• Formats and specs: [formats chosen, aspect ratios, lengths]
• Mandatories: [legal, brand, claims]
• Do not copy: [headlines, imagery, claims, logos to avoid]
• Reference ads: [2 to 4 links, labelled "inspiration, not to copy"]
• Success measure: [the metric the client will judge it by]

What prompt turns the ads into a brief in ChatGPT or Claude?

With Proxy connected, one prompt can run the research and draft the brief. Paste this and swap the brackets:

"I'm writing a creative brief for [client], who sells [product] to [audience]. Their competitors are [brand 1], [brand 2], [brand 3]. For each competitor, pull 15 active Meta ads and 10 Google ads. Build a table with one row per ad: hook (first line or first three seconds), angle, offer, format, days running, and how many near-duplicate versions exist. Transcribe the three longest-running video ads. Then list the patterns that appear in at least three ads or two competitors, state your confidence in each, and remind me that run length is an inference because the libraries show no spend or results. Finally fill in this brief: audience, single-minded proposition, proof, hook directions, offer, tone, formats, and a 'do not copy' list."

Read the output the way you'd read a junior's work: check the page names, spot-check three ads against the library, and strip any claim the data doesn't back. The assistant is fast at counting; the judgment about which angle to own is yours.

Where does inspiration end and copying begin?

Inspiration borrows a pattern (a structure, an angle, a kind of proof); copying borrows the expression (their headline, their imagery, their logo). Take the first and leave the second.

In practice: reuse the idea that price-anchored hooks hold the longest, not the competitor's exact line. Don't put a rival's logo in your ad. We cover why in can you use a competitor's logo in your ad, and it's mostly a trademark question that the ad platforms enforce too. If you want to name a competitor in a comparison, read can you mention competitors in ads first. This is general information, not legal advice, so ask a lawyer about your specific ad. Where is the line for your client? Write it down before the first draft, not after the first complaint.

Should you use the free libraries or Proxy?

Use the free libraries if you are briefing one campaign against one competitor and have an afternoon. Use Proxy when you need several competitors across platforms, video transcripts, or a brief by tomorrow.

Be clear on the limits. Proxy has no saved boards or swipe file, so keep your tagged sheet somewhere safe. TikTok coverage is EU-delivered ads, found by exact advertiser name. And nothing, Proxy included, can show you a commercial ad's spend or results. To compare the MCP servers that connect ad libraries to an AI assistant, see the best ad library MCP servers. To keep the research fresh after the brief ships, see how to monitor competitor ads and promotions.