There is a piece of knowledge that every experienced performance marketer knows and almost nobody talks about publicly because it is too valuable to give away for free.
Advertisers kill losing ads fast.
This is not sentiment or theory — it is operational reality. When you are spending £500 per day on a Meta campaign, every day a losing creative runs is money leaving your account without return. The economics of performance marketing create an almost biological pressure to eliminate creatives that do not convert. Most campaigns are structured to kill underperforming ads within three to seven days of launch.
Which means that any ad you see that has been running for fourteen days or more is, almost by definition, generating positive return on ad spend. The advertiser has seen the data. They have had every incentive to pause it. They have not. The ad is still running because it is working.
This insight hit me while I was helping a DTC client analyse why their creative testing was burning through budget without producing consistent winners. We were launching eight to twelve new creatives per month, running them for two weeks, and then making decisions about what to scale. The process was correct, methodologically. But we were building creative ideas in a vacuum, informed primarily by brand intuition and what we thought our audience wanted.
Meanwhile, our competitors were running ads that had been live for twenty-two days. Thirty-one days. One competitor had a video creative that I eventually tracked back to its first appearance — it had been running continuously for forty-seven days. That ad was generating enough revenue to justify nearly seven weeks of continuous spend. Whatever hook it opened with, whatever angle it took, whatever problem it addressed — that was proven, tested, validated creative strategy.
And all that information was publicly visible in Meta's Ads Library, TikTok's Creative Center, and Google's Ads Transparency Center. Three government-mandated advertising transparency tools, created to let users see what political ads are running, that turned out to be the most valuable competitive intelligence tool in digital marketing.
The Ad Creative Intelligence Scraper was built to make systematic use of that transparency.
You give it a list of advertiser names — your competitors, brands you admire in adjacent categories, companies whose customers overlap with yours. It searches Meta Ads Library, TikTok Creative Center, and Google Ads Transparency for active ads from those brands, captures the creative details — headline, body text, call to action, format, thumbnail URL — and calculates the days running figure for each ad.
The days running calculation is the core differentiator. A creative running for two days might be a test. One running for fourteen days is showing early signal. One running for thirty days is a proven winner. The actor surfaces this signal automatically, so instead of browsing libraries manually and guessing at which ads matter, you see a ranked list of the creatives most likely to be profitable.
Optionally — and this is where the tool gets genuinely interesting for creative strategists — you can pass each winning ad through Claude's API for hook analysis. The AI breaks down the creative structure: what type of hook was used (curiosity, problem, social proof, counter-intuitive claim), what emotional trigger the copy targets, whether the framing is value-proposition or transformation-oriented, and why the structure is likely to work psychologically. Not "this is a good ad" — but "this ad works because it opens with a specific fear, validates it immediately, and offers a single concrete escape route."
That level of analysis used to require a senior creative strategist. Now it costs £0.008 per ad analysed.
AdSpy charges £149 per month for access to ad databases that are, structurally, doing the same thing — indexing publicly available advertising data and presenting it in a searchable interface. The core value proposition is identical. The price difference is not. At £0.003 per ad found and £0.008 per ad with AI hook analysis, a researcher pulling fifty competitor ads with full analysis pays £0.55.
I built this tool initially for my own clients' competitive research workflows. The response when I put it on the Apify Store was faster than I expected. Performance marketers, media buyers, and DTC founders had all independently arrived at the same insight — that ad libraries were valuable, that days-running was the key signal, and that nobody had built an affordable, scriptable interface to that data.
The 14-day rule changed how I think about advertising. Not what to create, but how to identify what is already working and learn from it systematically. This actor is the infrastructure for doing that at scale.