Comparison
Waldo and Foreplay: the swipe file and the layer behind it
Foreplay organizes the ads your creative team loves. Waldo adds the market those ads live in.
The short answer
Foreplay is a creative workflow tool: save ads from the ad libraries into swipe files, track competitors with Spyder, and turn references into briefs. Waldo is the brand intelligence layer next door: 200+ API and MCP endpoints adding category angles, audience verbatims, and multi-domain market data your agents can pull into that same creative process.
Foreplay is built for performance creative teams, and it shows. Save ads from the Meta ad library and TikTok into organized swipe files, share boards with clients and creators, follow competitors continuously with Spyder, and turn saved references into briefs, scripts, and storyboards. It is self-serve, priced in published plans, and it lives exactly where creative production happens.
Waldo is not a swipe file, and this is not a feature war. It is the data layer adjacent to that workflow: brand activity, category trends, and audience conversation over 200+ REST endpoints and a native MCP server. Where Foreplay curates the creative you chose to save, Waldo carries the market around it: every tracked brand’s ads daily, the angles a category runs, and what audiences say back.
When each one wins
Choose Waldo when
- The question is bigger than inspiration: what angles a category runs, what audiences say back, where the ads send people.
- Agents draft your briefs and reports, so the market data has to arrive over API and MCP.
- You need the record kept: every captured ad stored permanently, even after it stops running.
- Multi-domain context matters: ads next to conversation, trends, events, and audience panels.
Choose Foreplay when
- Your creative team wants a shared swipe file: saved ads, organized boards, and collections clients can browse.
- Briefing is the bottleneck, and turning references into scripts and storyboards in one tool saves real hours.
- Always-on tracking of a chosen set of brands feeds your inspiration flow.
- Self-serve plans priced for creative teams make it an easy addition to the stack.
Feature by feature
| Feature | Waldo | Foreplay |
|---|---|---|
| The job | Market intelligence agents can query | Creative curation, inspiration, and briefing |
| Built for | Agents and the teams that run them | Creative teams producing paid social ads |
| Primary surface | 200+ REST endpoints plus a native MCP server | A workspace app for boards, briefs, and collections |
| Ad coverage | Meta and Google ad libraries tracked daily per tracked brand | Ads saved and followed by your team from the ad libraries |
| Beyond ads | Category trends, audience verbatims, panels, events, and landing page snapshots | Briefs, scripts, and storyboards for production |
| Pricing | Credit-metered, no per-seat fees | Published self-serve plans |
Where Waldo is different
The category’s angle taxonomy
/category/{id}/angle-library returns the messaging angles in play across a category, so creative strategy starts from what the whole market runs, not only the ads someone remembered to save.
What the audience says back
/audiences/{id}/conversations returns source-linked verbatims, the language real people use about the problem your ad addresses. Reference creative tells you what brands say; verbatims tell you what lands.
The full paid record, daily
Waldo pulls the Meta and Google ad libraries daily per tracked brand; one real pull returned 14,793 active Meta ads for a single brand. Everything is stored permanently, even after the ads stop running.
Delivery where agents work
The discover_ads MCP tool runs inside Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot, so an agent can gather competitor creative, angles, and verbatims into a brief draft in one pass.
Questions teams ask
Is Waldo a Foreplay replacement?
No. They are adjacent tools. Foreplay is the curation and briefing workspace creative teams work in; Waldo is the market data layer agents query. Plenty of teams would sensibly run both: swipe and brief in Foreplay, research and monitor through Waldo.
What does Waldo add to a creative workflow?
The parts curation cannot see: the category’s full angle taxonomy, audience verbatims in the customer’s own words, landing pages behind competitor ads via /brands/{id}/lp-changes, and a permanent ad record agents can diff daily with /brands/{id}/ads/active?since=.
How do I get started?
The beta is self-serve: sign up at /build/get-started, let the wizard mint an API key, and call discover_ads on a competitor from Claude or ChatGPT. Case studies with Crossmedia, McKinney, and PETERMAYER show how agency teams use the ad record.
Keep reading
Put Waldo behind your agents
Brand, category, and audience intelligence over 200+ API and MCP endpoints. Sign up, mint a key, and run it against the brands you actually track.