How Agencies Use Competitor Ads to Win Pitches

Why competitor ads win the pitch

Every agency pitch has a credentials section. Prospects skim it. What they don't skim is a slide that shows their biggest competitor's best ad, how long it has run and roughly what it has spent. That slide answers the question they actually have: why is that brand growing and we're not?

Competitor ads also do something case studies can't. They prove you understand this market before you've been paid a dollar.

We built the numbers below from the Ad Radar board on October 9, 2026: 2,443 live Meta ads from 749 advertisers, each with at least $50k in estimated spend.

The 32% figure is the one to remember. Most brands with several winners lean on one ad far more than the rest. Find that ad for each competitor and you've found the center of their strategy. Spend figures are estimates modeled on public engagement data. In a pitch, use them to rank ads, not to quote budgets.

The five slides

1. The market map

Three to five competitors. For each: how many active ads with real spend, the median days live, video versus image, and the landing page type they send traffic to. One table, no commentary. The prospect will read it slowly.

2. Each competitor's anchor ad

The ad with the highest estimated spend and the longest run. Show the hook (first line), days live, variants and the estimated spend. This is the slide people photograph.

3. The hook and angle mix

What kinds of openers and angles each competitor uses, counted. This turns a pile of ads into a pattern. Brands on our board with 5+ winners use a median of three hook patterns, so each competitor will have a recognizable "voice". For the vocabulary, see hook pattern vs hook mechanism.

4. The gap

What nobody in the set is doing. An angle no one uses, a proof type missing, an awareness level skipped. This is where the agency earns its fee. Ad angles and awareness levels give you the categories to look for gaps in.

5. Three concept sketches

One line each: hook, angle, format, landing page. Not finished ads. Enough to show you can turn research into creative. Our creative brief template has the full format if they want detail later.

A worked example: two laundry brands

Say your prospect sells a laundry or home-cleaning product. Two competitors on our board stand out: a detergent sheet brand (Earth Breeze, 23 ads) and a washing machine cleaner (Uproot Clean, 18 ads). Here's what the slides would show.

Both brands sell on a root cause: liquid detergent is mostly water, or the washer itself is dirty. But the strategies differ. Earth Breeze spreads across openers and leans on its sales, speaking mostly to people who already know the product. Uproot repeats one move for cold audiences: a warning delivered by someone who repairs washing machines, with no offer in the hook.

The gap slide for this prospect might say: between them, 41 winning ads and only two carry strong proof (a test, a measured result). One competitor owns cold audiences with warnings, the other owns warm audiences with discounts, and the solution-aware buyer, someone already shopping for a better cleaner, gets five ads in total. That suggests three concepts: an on-camera test against the category leader, a proof-led ad for solution-aware shoppers, and a warning-style ad that ends on an offer. Each is grounded in what the market already pays for, and none is a copy.

Then the prospect asks the question you want: "How did you find all this?"

Where agencies get this wrong

• Showing too many ads. Twenty screenshots look like research but read like noise. Two to four per competitor, chosen for spend and days live.
• Quoting spend as fact. Nobody outside Meta knows a competitor's exact spend. Say "estimated" every time. A prospect who catches an overclaim will discount the rest.
• Proposing copies. "Let's make their ad" invites the question of why they need you. Show the pattern, then a different execution.
• Skipping the prospect's own ads. Pull theirs too. If their best ad has run 20 days and the competitor's 200, that's the slide that closes.

Turning research into a deliverable

Once the account is won, the same research becomes the onboarding document and the first month's creative plan. That's where tooling pays off for an agency, because you're doing this for every client, every month.

Ad Radar's Agency plan is built for that: $199 every four weeks for 25 client workspaces and 5 seats. Boards of competitor ads can be shared by link or exported to CSV for the deck, and the client portal lets clients approve ads as guests, white-labeled. Any winning ad can be turned into a creative brief. Plan details are on the pricing page.

For the research process itself, see the competitor ad research process and how to estimate competitor ad spend.

A pitch prep checklist

1. List the prospect's top 3 to 5 competitors (ask them on the intro call; they'll name them).
2. Pull each competitor's ads with 60+ days live, sorted by estimated spend.
3. Mark each one's anchor ad. Note its hook, angle, format, landing page.
4. Count hook patterns and angles per competitor. Put it in one table.
5. Write the gap in one sentence.
6. Sketch three concepts that fill it.
7. Pull the prospect's own ads and compare days live.
8. Put credentials last, on one slide.

Figures marked as estimated spend come from Ad Radar's model of engagement on public Meta Ad Library ads. They are estimates, labeled as such, and are best used to rank ads against each other.