What is ad intelligence?

For decades this was a panel business: vendors estimated competitor ad activity from samples of what panelists saw, and sold the modeled numbers. Transparency regulation changed the field. Meta’s Ad Library opened all active ads to public inspection in 2019, Google followed with its Ads Transparency Center, and other platforms added equivalents, which turned competitor creative from an estimate into a public record anyone can read.

Practitioners use ad intelligence for competitor tracking, angle mining, promo monitoring, and new business preparation, and they lean on longevity as the honest performance proxy: platforms and advertisers kill ads that do not work, so creative that has run for months is probably earning its keep. Reading a competitor’s active set over time reveals strategy, which audiences they are testing, which angles they are scaling, and which they quietly retired.

The limit to respect: the libraries show creative, not performance. Spend and impressions stay hidden outside political advertising, and third-party spend estimates are modeled from panels, which can be badly wrong for any individual brand. Longevity and volume are defensible inferences; confident dollar figures deserve suspicion.

How this shows up in Waldo

Waldo pulls the Meta and Google ad libraries daily for tracked brands: /brands/{id}/ads/active returns the live set, ?since= narrows to what changed, and the discover_ads tool works at request time for brands not yet tracked. Pulls run at real scale, a single Meta pull has returned 14,793 ads, and everything is stored permanently, so past campaigns stay inspectable after they stop running.

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