Sales, Marketing & Ad Tech
Advertising Creative Intelligence API
Your competitors' advertising is largely public now. Almost nobody is reading it systematically, which is why the same messaging gets reinvented every quarter.
- Ad tech platforms
- Media agencies
- Competitive intelligence vendors
- Brand marketing teams
What your customers would see
example interfaceMockupIllustrative mockup of the interface we would build. Figures shown are examples, not results from a live deployment.
The problem this solves
Advertising transparency requirements and platform ad libraries changed what is knowable about competitor activity. Creatives, run dates, formats and in some cases approximate spend bands are published. The information is sitting there, and the normal way of consuming it is a strategist manually browsing a library before a pitch, screenshotting whatever looks interesting.
That approach misses the thing most worth knowing, which is change over time. Which creatives have been running longest — a reasonable proxy for what is working. When a competitor shifted messaging from price to reliability. Which offers appear seasonally. When a new entrant started spending in a category. None of that is visible in a browsing session; all of it is visible in a tracked archive.
The work is unglamorous. Transparency sources differ in structure, completeness and retention, and several drop creatives once they stop running, so an archive has to be captured continuously or the history is simply gone. Creative content then has to be parsed — text from images, claims from video, offers from copy — and clustered into messaging themes that a strategist recognises rather than a topic model's word salad.
Who buys this
Ad tech platforms, Media agencies, Competitive intelligence vendors, Brand marketing teams
What the API returns
What comes back
- Competitor creative archive with first-seen, last-seen and run duration
- Messaging theme extraction clustered into recognisable positioning categories
- Offer and claim extraction: discounts, guarantees, comparisons, product claims
- Format and placement mix across the tracked advertiser set
- Activity trend by advertiser, category and region, with new-entrant detection
- Creative longevity ranking, since long-running creatives indicate what an advertiser keeps funding
- Change detection on messaging shifts and campaign launches
- Source coverage reporting per platform and region, so gaps are explicit
Endpoints
| Method | Path | Returns |
|---|---|---|
| GET | /v1/advertisers/{id}/creatives | Creative archive with run dates and formats |
| GET | /v1/advertisers/{id}/themes | Messaging themes with share and trend |
| POST | /v1/categories/compare | Messaging comparison across a competitor set |
| GET | /v1/activity | Activity trend with new-entrant detection |
| GET | /v1/creatives/{id} | One creative with extracted text, claims and offers |
| GET | /v1/changes | Detected messaging shifts and campaign launches |
Request and response
illustrativeRequest
{
"advertisers": ["Northbridge Mfg", "Calder Group"],
"category": "industrial_instrumentation",
"regions": ["US", "DE"],
"window": { "from": "2026-04-01", "to": "2026-10-22" },
"include": ["themes", "offers", "longevity"]
}Response
{
"window": { "from": "2026-04-01", "to": "2026-10-22" },
"source_coverage": {
"platform_a": { "regions": ["US", "DE"], "retention": "indefinite" },
"platform_b": { "regions": ["US"], "retention": "active_only",
"note": "Creatives removed when they stop running; archive is ours from 2026-04" }
},
"advertisers": [
{
"advertiser": "Northbridge Mfg",
"creatives_observed": 184,
"formats": { "static": 0.52, "video": 0.38, "carousel": 0.10 },
"themes": [
{ "theme": "Calibration accuracy and certification", "share": 0.41,
"trend": "rising", "first_seen": "2026-06-02" },
{ "theme": "Lead time and availability", "share": 0.27, "trend": "falling" },
{ "theme": "Price comparison against named competitors", "share": 0.12,
"trend": "new", "first_seen": "2026-09-18" }
],
"longest_running": [
{ "creative_id": "crv_41802", "days_running": 148,
"headline": "[extracted copy]", "offer": null },
{ "creative_id": "crv_40119", "days_running": 121,
"headline": "[extracted copy]", "offer": "free calibration audit" }
],
"messaging_shift": { "detected_on": "2026-09-18",
"from": "lead time", "to": "price comparison" }
}
]
}Where the data comes from
| Platform ad transparency libraries | Publicly published creatives and run data; structure, completeness and retention differ substantially per platform |
| Regulatory advertising disclosures | Where jurisdictions require publication of political or regulated-sector advertising |
| Your own creative and campaign data | Optional, and it is what makes competitor themes comparable to your own positioning rather than free-floating |
| Continuous archive capture | Several sources drop creatives once they stop running, so history exists only if it was captured at the time — this is the single most important design point |
| Advertiser identity resolution data | Company registries and brand reference data, since advertiser names in libraries are inconsistent and often entity-level rather than brand-level |
| Licensed spend estimate providers | Where approximate spend matters; estimates are modelled rather than observed and we would label them accordingly |
The intelligence layer
The difference between a demo and a service is mostly in this section. These are the parts that keep the answer trustworthy once real traffic is hitting it.
- Continuous capture with full creative archival, because the upstream sources are not archives and treating them as one loses history permanently
- Creative content extraction: text from static images, on-screen text and spoken copy from video, with quality flags where extraction is weak
- Messaging theme clustering reviewed against a human-defined taxonomy, so themes come back as positioning categories a strategist recognises rather than token clusters
- Claim and offer extraction into structured fields, which is what makes seasonal and promotional patterns analysable
- Advertiser identity resolution across inconsistent library naming, including agency-of-record and subsidiary cases
- Longevity as a primary metric, on the reasoning that an advertiser renewing a creative for months is revealing more than any engagement proxy
- Change-point detection on theme share to identify genuine messaging shifts rather than normal creative rotation
- Explicit source coverage reporting per platform and region, so an apparent drop in a competitor's activity is distinguishable from a gap in coverage
What it changes for the business
Competitor moves spotted early
Theme-share change detection catches a repositioning while it is a handful of new creatives.
Pitches with evidence
A tracked archive replaces screenshots with run durations, theme shares and dated messaging shifts.
Creative decisions informed
Knowing which competitor creatives have run for months is more informative than any guess at what performs.
Category structure visible
New-entrant detection and activity trends show when a category is getting more crowded before it shows up in cost per click.
How it fits into your product
How it embeds
- REST endpoints feeding your own competitive intelligence screens and client reports
- Change webhooks on messaging shifts, campaign launches and new entrants
- Creative asset references with extracted text, so your interface can render the archive
- Bulk export for agencies maintaining their own warehouses
- White-label delivery, with source coverage notes carried into client output
- Per-client entitlements on advertiser count, regions and history depth
Included in every build
- Authentication, scoped API keys and per-customer rate limiting
- Input validation with predictable, documented error responses
- Versioned endpoints so your integration never breaks without notice
- Request and response logging for audit and dispute resolution
- Latency, error-rate and usage monitoring with alerting
- OpenAPI specification, sandbox environment and client examples
- Backups, failover design and a documented recovery procedure
- An agreed support arrangement once the service is live
How we would build it
about 12 weeksDiscovery and data review
Weeks 1–2
We agree the exact question the API answers, review the sources you already hold, check what has to be licensed, and write down the response contract your developers will code against.
Architecture and prototype
Weeks 3–4
You get a written architecture plus a working endpoint on real data — narrow, but genuinely callable — so integration can be tested against something concrete rather than a document.
Production build
Weeks 5–10
Pipelines, models, storage, authentication, rate limiting, logging, tests and documentation. Security and observability are part of this phase, not a later one.
Integration and handover
Weeks 11–12
We support your engineers through their integration, run load tests at your expected volume, and agree how the service is monitored and supported once it is live.
Commercial models
There is no fixed price list, because the cost is driven by data complexity, integration count, model requirements, request volume and the support level you need. Scope is agreed in writing before development starts.
Fixed-scope prototype
A defined slice of the service, built and priced as one piece of work. The usual first step when the business case needs proving internally.
Fixed-price build
An agreed scope against a written architecture, delivered for an agreed price. Best when the requirements are already clear.
Build then retainer
We build the service, then operate and improve it under a monthly agreement covering monitoring, updates and model maintenance.
White-label product
The service runs under your brand, your domain and your pricing, with MLPivot invisible to your customers.
Questions buyers ask
Can you report competitor ad spend?
Only as whatever the source publishes, which is usually a wide band or nothing at all. Precise spend figures circulating in this market are modelled estimates, often with large errors, and we would label any we include as estimates rather than presenting them as observed. Impression and spend bands where a platform publishes them are facts; everything else is inference and should be read as such.
What can you actually collect, and from where?
Publicly published transparency libraries and regulatory disclosures, within each source's terms. Those terms sometimes permit access for analysis but restrict redistribution of the creative assets themselves, which affects whether your product can display a competitor's image or only its extracted text. We establish that per source during discovery, because it changes the interface you can build.
How complete is the coverage?
Incomplete, and the gaps are uneven. Not every platform publishes a library, those that do differ in what they include and how long they keep it, and regional coverage varies. The API reports coverage per platform and region on every response specifically so a quiet competitor is distinguishable from a blind spot. Anyone claiming complete visibility into competitor advertising is overstating what the sources permit.
Does creative longevity really indicate performance?
It is a reasonable proxy and not a measurement. An advertiser renewing a creative for five months is probably seeing acceptable results, but it could equally be an inattentive account or a long brand campaign with non-performance goals. We present it as duration, which is observed, rather than as effectiveness, which is not.
How far back can history go?
For sources that retain creatives, as far back as they retain them. For sources that drop inactive creatives — which is common — history begins when capture begins. We normally start the archive during the prototype so it is accumulating while the build continues, because that history cannot be recovered later at any price.
Related blueprints
Brand Reputation Monitoring API
Mentions, sentiment, emerging complaint themes and topic trends across permitted public sources, aggregated rather than person-level.
SEO Ranking Intelligence API
Search positions, ranking movement and location-specific results tracked per keyword and competitor, as a data layer inside your marketing tool.
Company Enrichment API
Industry, size, locations, technology and firmographic attributes resolved from a domain or company name, with change detection.
Want this built for your platform?
Tell us what your product does today and what you want another system to be able to ask it. We will come back with an approach, a scope and a price.