The problem this solves
Video is where competitor advertising actually happens now, and it is exactly the part most teardowns skip. The ad libraries make static creatives easy: text fields, headlines, landing pages, all copyable into a document. The video creatives sit beside them as thumbnails, and the analysis quietly routes around them - someone might watch two or three, form an impression, and write "they lean heavily on video" as if that were a finding.
What hides inside those skipped files is the most deliberate work your competitors produce. The first three seconds were tested against a dozen alternatives. The price overlay appears at the exact moment their data says attention dips. The CTA card carries wording that survived rounds of iteration. None of it reaches your strategy while video analysis means a person watching ads one by one with a notepad, because nobody sustains that weekly.
This mission watches them all, properly. It pulls the current video creatives from the ad libraries, analyzes each one - transcript, hook, storyboard, every piece of on-screen text quoted exactly as rendered - and assembles the teardown by advertiser and pattern. What was an impression becomes an evidence file.
How the mission runs
- Pull the current video creatives. The ad libraries return each competitor's running video ads with direct media URLs - the transparency data platforms are required to publish. Duplicate creatives across placements are collapsed, so the analysis covers each distinct video once.
- Watch each ad frame by frame. Each creative runs through video analysis: a burst across the first three seconds, key frames across the rest, and the audio track. The output is a timestamped storyboard with the spoken words and every on-screen element - text quoted verbatim, never paraphrased.
- Extract the persuasion architecture. From each storyboard the mission pulls the parts that carry strategy: what the hook shows and claims, when the price or offer appears and in what words, how long before the CTA, and what the CTA actually says. These are decisions someone tested; they are read as such.
- Find the patterns across advertisers. With every ad decoded, the cross-read begins: which hook formats repeat, whether competitors show pricing on screen, how their CTA wording clusters, and where their approaches diverge. One ad is an anecdote; the full set is a playbook made visible.
- Deliver the teardown deck. The findings land as a deck organized by competitor: their ads, the storyboards with quoted overlays, the hook-to-CTA timeline of each, and a closing read on the patterns and the gaps your own creative can attack.
The prompt
This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.
What comes back
A video-ad teardown covering every current competitor creative: per-ad storyboards with the transcript, hook description, and all on-screen text quoted exactly, plus the cross-advertiser pattern read - hook formats, price-reveal timing, CTA wording - and the openings they leave you. The quotes are exact, so the deck argues from evidence.
Make it yours
- Rerun monthly and lead with what changed: new hooks, retired formats, and shifted offers are the intelligence, and exact quotes make the comparison precise.
- Narrow to one competitor ahead of a launch against them, pairing it with the click-through teardown so their video story and landing story are read together.
- Add your own running ads to the set, so the deck shows your creative beside theirs under the same lens.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the video files come from?
From the ad libraries the platforms publish for transparency - the same first-party sources the text-ad tools read, which include direct URLs to the video creatives. The mission analyzes those files; nothing is scraped from private surfaces.
Why does quoting on-screen text exactly matter?
Because overlays carry the tested wording: the price framing, the guarantee, the CTA verb. A paraphrase loses precisely the detail someone paid to optimize. The analysis is instructed to transcribe on-screen text verbatim, so the teardown can cite it like a document.
How many ads can one run cover?
A typical run covers the current creatives of three to five competitors comfortably - usually ten to twenty-five distinct videos. Larger sweeps split by competitor across scheduled runs, which also builds the month-over-month record.