How to research a prospect's ads before a pitch

Most pitch prep stops at the prospect's website and LinkedIn page. Their live ads, the most current statement of what they're paying to say, sit in public libraries that almost nobody opens before a call. Each library shows one brand at a time, with no analysis attached, which is the whole reason this gets skipped. Here's how to research a prospect's ads before a pitch without turning it into a week-long project.

How do you research a prospect's ads before a pitch?

You research a prospect's ads before a pitch by finding their advertiser account on each ad library, reading what's live, checking two or three competitors, and turning the gaps into slides. The routine:

1. Find the prospect's advertiser account on Meta, Google, LinkedIn and, if they sell in Europe, TikTok.
2. Read their live ads: formats, copy, offer, landing page.
3. Check the run dates. Old ads and a pile of brand-new ones tell different stories.
4. Repeat for two or three competitors.
5. Write down the gaps: a platform they skip, creative that hasn't changed in months, a format their rivals use and they don't.
6. Turn the gaps into three slides and one opening line for the pitch or the outreach email.

Budget about an hour. The first pass is mostly finding the right accounts; after that it's reading. For the platform-by-platform mechanics, our guide on how to spy on competitors' ads covers each library. Sound like a lot? It isn't, the second time round.

What do you need before you start?

The prospect's name and website, a list of two or three direct competitors, a notes doc and an hour. No logins for Meta or Google. That's it.

How do you find the right advertiser account on each platform?

You find the right advertiser account by searching each library with the prospect's name or domain, then checking that the page, website and logo match the company. Names collide more often than you'd expect.

Platform	Where to look	Search by	Watch out for
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)	Meta Ad Library	Page name	Look-alike pages; separate regional pages
Google (Search, YouTube, Display)	Ads Transparency Center	Advertiser name or domain	Try the domain, not only the brand name
LinkedIn	LinkedIn Ad Library	Advertiser name	Parent company vs product-brand pages
TikTok (EU only)	Commercial Content Library	Registered advertiser name	Legal entity names; no US-only campaigns

Meta's library has been open to anyone, with or without an account, since its 2019 launch, per TechCrunch's launch coverage.

The Meta trap costs the most. When we pulled Notion's ads with Proxy, the top-ranked, blue-verified Meta page for "Notion" was an unrelated London creative magazine with 2 active ads, and the real account (NotionHQ, not verified, an estimated 200 active ads) was the second candidate. Build a deck on the wrong page and you look careless in the first five minutes.

So check the website link and the ad landing pages before you read a single creative.

Google starts from an advertiser name or domain rather than a keyword in the creative, and a lookup of notion.com resolved straight to Notion Labs, Inc. On LinkedIn the same sanity check applies, and our guide to how to see competitors' LinkedIn ads shows where the company pages hide.

TikTok is the narrowest. Its library only includes ads delivered in the EU; according to TikTok, and in its own words, "we are ONLY including data from EU countries". If your prospect only sells in the US, an empty result tells you nothing. If they sell in Europe, search by the registered legal name (Cursor, for example, advertises as Anysphere), as our TikTok ad library guide explains. Different library, different rules. And the same sanity check on every one: does the advertiser's website match the prospect's?

What should you look for in a prospect's live ads?

Look at five things in a prospect's live ads: the formats, the angle and offer, where each ad lands, how long it has been running, and how many ads there are. Together they show whether paid media is a managed channel or an afterthought.

1. Format mix. All static images, no video? Single-image ads only, no carousels? A thin mix is a pitch opening.
2. Angle and offer. What does the hook promise: price, speed, status, social proof? Five ads that say five different things, or the same thing five times?
3. Landing page. Click through. A generic homepage behind a specific offer is a classic leak.
4. Run dates. Practitioners commonly read an ad that has run for 30, 60 or 90 days as likely working, since advertisers rarely keep paying for a loser; that's a heuristic, not a measurement, so say "likely" in the room. A cluster of ads that all started in the same recent week usually means a test or a new person on the account.
5. Volume and freshness. Three ads that haven't changed since spring is a different company from 60 ads rotating weekly. Meta's own analytics team found that after about four repeated exposures to the same creative, the likelihood of converting drops by around 45%, which makes a stale creative set worth flagging.

Auditing only a prospect's Facebook ads for a pitch? Set the country to the market you'd actually serve (a prospect's US page and its UK page can run entirely different ads), then read the ads in order of start date. Our guide to how to see competitors' Facebook ads has the filters, and it's worth ten minutes before you start screenshotting anything you can't later date.

Keep notes as you go, one line each, with the start date and platform. Which of the five would your prospect's team least want to be asked about?

How do you analyze a prospect's competitors' ads before a pitch?

You analyze a prospect's competitors' ads by repeating the same five checks on two or three direct rivals and putting the results in one small table. The point is the difference, not the volume. And a table makes the difference hard to argue with.

1. Pick the rivals. If you don't know them, ask the prospect's sales team, or search the category and see who shows up.
2. Run the platform lookups above for each one.
3. Record, per brand: platforms present, format mix, dominant angle, oldest live ad.
4. Put them side by side.

Here is a real one, pulled with Proxy on October 25, 2026 for three work-management tools, with Notion standing in for the prospect. Every figure is a count of public ads, capped at the first 100 per library where noted, and none of it says how well any ad performs:

	Notion	Airtable	monday.com
Meta: live ads	100 (pull cap)	64	0 on its main Page
Meta: formats	44 image, 31 carousel, 25 video	32 image, 32 carousel, no video	none
Meta: oldest live ad started	2026-05-21	2026-03-26	n/a
Meta: most repeated message	One headline on 84 of 100 ads	Ebooks and reports: a Download button on 50 of 64 ads	n/a
Google: live ads (first 100)	44 text, 38 video, 18 image	93 text, no image or video	51 text, 48 video
LinkedIn: live ads (first page)	24, mostly video	24: 18 single image, 6 video	24: 14 single image, 4 video, 6 follow-company ads

Read it for gaps, not verdicts. Airtable runs no video on Meta or Google, and its video appears only on LinkedIn. monday.com has plenty of live Google and LinkedIn ads and none on its main Meta Page, which could mean it advertises through other Pages or regions, so you would check that before saying anything to them. Notion repeats one message on 84 of 100 Meta ads, which tells you what it is pushing, not whether it works.

The row you want is the one where a rival is doing something the prospect isn't. Seer Interactive makes the same point for agencies: according to its 2024 write-up, the libraries are a good way to pitch additional platforms to clients. Which gap would you bring up first?

What do ad libraries not show about a prospect?

Ad libraries do not show how much a prospect spends or how well their ads perform. Meta says its Ad Library lets people search all active ads, but spend and reach are provided only for ads about social issues, elections or politics.

Google's Ads Transparency Center lists the advertiser, who pays, and the ads served, with targeting information and recipient counts only in certain regions, according to Google's help page. Spend? Not mentioned.

LinkedIn's Ad Library shows the ad preview, format, advertiser and payer, according to LinkedIn's help page, with impressions, targeting and run dates added for ads in the EU. Europe gets more because of the law: Article 39 of the Digital Services Act requires very large platforms to keep an ad repository, including targeting parameters and reach, until a year after an ad last ran.

Time matters too. Ads don't stay searchable forever once they stop. For EU delivery, Meta archives ads for one year after their last impression, LinkedIn keeps ads for one year after their last impression, and TikTok keeps its EU ad data until one year after an ad was last shown. So the library is a good read on what's live now and a patchy record of what ran last year. An ad that's gone from the library tells you little about whether it worked.

In practice:

• Do not quote spend, ROAS or "winning ads" as fact. You can't see them.
• Don't read a gap as no activity. A missing TikTok result may only mean no EU delivery.
• Expect rough edges. A 2024 Mozilla and Check First audit found Meta has among the most mature offering yet its library still has "big gaps in data and functionality."

How do you turn what you found into pitch slides and an outreach line?

You turn your findings into a pitch by choosing the three strongest gaps, giving each one slide with a screenshot and a one-sentence observation, and opening with the single most specific one. To use competitor ads in a pitch deck, show them as examples next to the prospect's, not as an attack. Three slides are enough; ten reads like a lecture.

1. Slide one: where they show up. Platforms with live ads, against two rivals.
2. Slide two: what they say. Two or three of their live ads beside the rival ad that makes the stronger offer.
3. Slide three: the opening. One format, platform or message they're missing, and what you'd test first.

For cold outreach, lead with the observation, not the compliment:

"Noticed [Brand] has run the same two static image ads on Meta since June, while [Rival] has rotated video on both Meta and Google. Happy to send over three ideas for the first test."

The same look doubles as a two-minute way to qualify a lead by their ad activity. Live ads on two or more platforms means paid media is a current line item; none at all may call for a different pitch (or a different prospect). Neither tells you the budget, so ask on the call.

These ads are public by design, so saying you saw them is normal. Pretending you can see their results isn't.

Can ChatGPT or Claude pull a prospect's ads for you?

Yes. With Proxy connected, you can ask Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor to find the prospect's advertiser accounts, pull their live ads, discover competitors and compare them in one conversation. Proxy reads the same public libraries (Meta, Google, LinkedIn and TikTok's EU repository) and hands the ads back for your assistant to analyze.

	Free libraries by hand	Asking an assistant with Proxy
Best for	One prospect, one platform	A prospect plus rivals, across platforms
Finding rivals	You work them out yourself	Ask for competitors by name, domain or description
Account matching	You check each page	Returns ranked candidates; you still confirm
Video ads	Watch each one	Ask for a transcript of any video ad
Output	Screenshots and notes	A written comparison in your chat
Cost	Free	Free to start, 20 credits a day, no card; each library call is 1 credit

A typical ask:

"Find Notion's advertiser accounts on Meta and Google, pull their active ads, find three competitors, and tell me which formats and platforms they use that Notion doesn't."

The free libraries win for a quick one-off check: one prospect, one platform, ten minutes. Proxy earns its place when you're prepping several pitches or comparing across platforms.

It has limits. Proxy can only show what the libraries show, so there's no spend or performance. TikTok covers EU-delivered ads and needs the exact advertiser name. And it can hand you two plausible pages for one name, which is why you check the site link yourself. As a rough guide, one brand on one platform is typically a lookup plus an ad fetch, about two credits.

Is prospecting a real use? It is. Data from Proxy shows that in the 60 days to October 25, 2026, at least 21 of 167 users (12.6%) and at least 81 of 1,406 conversations (5.8%) stated a prospecting or pitch goal, meaning the goal an assistant states when it calls a Proxy tool mentioned a prospect, outreach, a pitch, a cold call or email, or new business. Keyword matching undercounts, so read those as floors, not a share of all usage. To connect it, see how to see competitor ads in ChatGPT and Claude.

Where should you start before your next pitch?

Start with one prospect you already have a call booked with. Open the Meta Ad Library, find the right page, and write down three things you notice before you build a slide. When the list of brands gets long enough that you'd rather ask than open another tab, that's the moment to hand it to your assistant. The best opener isn't a clever line. It's an accurate observation they didn't expect you to have.