Use case
Catch competitor promos as their ads launch
Daily ad diffs, so new promo creative arrives as an alert instead of a Monday morning surprise.
Updated
The short answer
Waldo tracks the ads that announce an offer. Daily scans plus the since parameter surface new promo creative with its copy attached, so a flash sale or a free-shipping push shows up the day its ads go live. Diffs push to Slack on your schedule.
The job to be done
For an ecommerce or retail team, a competitor’s offer change is a same-day problem: a surprise flash sale bleeds a weekend of conversions before anyone notices. The manual defense is someone scrolling rival ad libraries on Monday, which is how the Friday promo gets missed. And when pricing asks what the set is running right now, the answer is usually a stale screenshot.
What the team needs on record is every live offer in the set: when it appeared, what the ad promised, and when the ad changed. It should behave like a diff feed a channel owner subscribes to, not a research task someone remembers to do.
How Waldo does it
Watch the ads announce it
GET /brands/{id}/ads/active?since= on a cron returns only what changed since the last pull. New promo creative shows up in the delta with copy and creative attached.
Keep the whole promo history
Captured ads are stored permanently, so last year’s holiday offers are still on record. Seasonal patterns become queryable instead of living in a veteran’s memory.
Route the alert
Push deltas to Slack, a webhook, or a database, and let the channel owner ask follow-ups over MCP: what did they run last Black Friday, how long did the bundle offer survive.
The endpoints
/brands/{id}/ads/active?since=Only the ads that changed since your last pullMCP: discover_adsAd-hoc promo questions answered in chatDiscover endpointsLive queries for organic promo posts beyond the ad librariesQuestions teams ask
How quickly do offer changes show up?
Tracked brands’ ads refresh on a 24-hour cycle, so a change lands in the next daily pull and the alert fires from your diff job.
Do expired promos disappear from the record?
No. Captured ads are stored permanently even after the promo ends, which is what makes year-over-year promo pattern analysis possible.
What about promos that never run as ads?
Waldo does not monitor competitor websites, so a site-only promo will not show up. Promos posted organically do: tracked brands’ owned posts refresh daily, and Discover endpoints query the platforms live for promo posts outside the tracked set.
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