Advertising Intelligence: How Data Informs Smarter Campaign Strategy

Search and social media platforms. Programmatic and native advertising networks. Clicks, views and conversions. CPA, CPC, ROAS. Advertisers have a lot to juggle and monitor — and that doesn’t even include keeping an eye on what competitors are doing. Toss in ever-increasing costs, and it’s clear that marketers can no longer make ad decisions based on hunches or incomplete information.

Enter advertising intelligence. By providing visibility into competitor activity, campaign performance and market trends, it transforms guesswork into data-backed decision-making. Below we’ll explore exactly what advertising intelligence is, why it matters and how the insights it provides can help you strengthen your brand.

What Is Digital Advertising Intelligence?

Let’s dig into digital advertising intelligence — what it is, how it works and why it’s important. 

Digital advertising intelligence defined

Digital advertising intelligence gathers, aggregates and analyzes data from your ad campaigns and competitors across all digital channels so that you can make data-informed decisions to improve your advertising and overall brand performance. 

Ad intelligence data comes from many sources, including ad and video platforms, display networks, search engines and social media. Analytics tools track and evaluate audience, engagement, cost and performance metrics. This combination of digital ads, intelligence and technology shows what’s working, for both you and your competitors, and where opportunities lie. 

How digital ad intelligence works 

Digital ad intelligence begins with gathering data from multiple ad platforms so that analytics tools can identify metrics and trends and then deliver insights that you can use to inform marketing, creative and fiscal decisions.

• Data collection. Advertising intelligence tools crawl ad networks and platforms, tracking placements, capturing audience data, and monitoring tracking codes, metadata and creative variations from both your brand and your competitors.

• Analysis. AI-powered tools detect patterns and collate data to identify trends, estimate spend, measure share of voice and benchmark performance.

• Reporting. Dashboards make your findings easily accessible by visualizing competitive activity, creative strategies and market shifts.

• Application. Teams throughout your organization use insights to hone ad creative, refine targeting and adjust ad budgets and allocations in or close to real time. 

• Incorporation. Your business adds your findings to your brand tracking program to monitor the impact of advertising on brand health over the long term. 

Why Advertising Intelligence Matters for Modern Marketers 

More and more agencies and brands are relying on advertising intelligence as a way to help clarify their complex marketing ecosystems to improve outcomes.

Competitive visibility drives better decisions 

Competitive visibility — knowing where competitors advertise, how much they spend, and their creative approaches — enables brands to better understand audience needs and identify marketplace opportunities so that they can strengthen their positioning, targeting and messaging to gain market share. 

Seeing what competitors are doing before you launch a campaign allows you to fine-tune your strategy and tactics before buying ads. Not only does this help you improve ROAS, but it also allows you to discover white spaces in the market that you can fill. Also, benchmarking your spend and performance against competitors reveals where you should be testing and polishing creative and targeting tactics. 

Budget optimization and performance 

By revealing which channels, platforms and placements reap the greatest results, advertising intelligence guides brands toward improved budget allocations and better ROI based on evidence rather than assumptions or instincts.   

For instance, if a competitor is dramatically outperforming your brand on a specific platform, you might decide it’s more cost-effective to reduce your spend on that platform and invest in alternate channels that digital advertising intelligence has identified as high performing. And because these ad intel insights are available in or near real time, you can adjust spend immediately rather than waiting for monthly or quarterly reports, by which time the campaign might have already ended. 

Creative strategy and market intelligence 

Tracking and analyzing your ads, as well as those of your competitors, reveals which creative formats and messaging styles perform best across the entire market category. You can then use these insights to identify current and emerging trends worth testing.  

Advertising intelligence also calls attention to overused creative approaches you can avoid to ensure your brand remains distinctive. You can also learn from competitors’ successful and unsuccessful creative tests without having to invest in similar tests yourself.

What Ad Intelligence Data Gets Tracked? 

Advertising intelligence platforms use device and user identifiers, behavioral patterns, performance metrics and other information to track four core categories of data: budget and spend; creative and messaging; placement and performance; and audience. 

• Ad spend and investor data. Knowing estimated competitor ad spend and budget allocation across audio, display, search, social and video platforms can reveal seasonal patterns, campaign surges and other trends over time. 

• Creative and messaging data. Every aspect of ad creative, from images and videos to headlines and body copy, can be collected and analyzed, along with landing page designs and offers. This includes creative variations and A/B tests. You can then use these findings to improve creative, messaging themes and positioning strategies.

• Placement and performance data. Placement data encompasses the platforms, publishers and networks where ads appear, as well as ad formats and sizes and geographic and device targeting. Performance data includes estimated impressions, reach and engagement. 

• Audience and targeting data. Advertising intelligence platforms examine placement data and the demographic and psychographic profiles for each platform. Retargeting and lookalike strategies along with interest-based and behavioral targeting parameters provide additional data points to help assess your competitors’ audiences.  

How Advertising Intelligence Informs Creative Strategy 

The value of advertising intelligence to media buyers and budget planners is obvious. But creative teams and brand strategists sometimes give these findings short shrift. Organizations that don’t use ad intelligence when making creative and strategic decisions, however, aren’t realizing the full potential and value of the data. 

Understanding the creative landscape 

Digital ad intelligence uncovers which visual styles, design approaches, messaging frameworks and even types of models perform better or worse, giving creative teams a market-validated sense of direction that can support decisions and even encourage brands to break out of their creative ruts.  

A pet food brand might notice that ads with large dogs outperform those featuring cats in certain regions, or that animated videos lead to more conversions than live-action content. But advertising intelligence doesn’t merely reveal what works; it also shows market gaps ripe for exploitation. For example, a fintech company launching a product might discover that a dark palette and corporate language dominate its competitors’ creative, leading it to consider livelier colors or a conversational tone to stand out.   

Strategic differentiation through data 

Analyzing the creative landscape and viewing ads in the context of the entire market helps brands discover ways to differentiate themselves by introducing underutilized formats, unique messaging angles and unexpected aesthetics. If its competitors aren’t posting on TikTok, for example, a home furnishings brand might test the channel to see if it can make the platform work — and gain significant audience share and loyalty.   

Ad intelligence data can provide the verification needed to go ahead with seemingly risky creative decisions, just as competitive benchmarks can help justify and shape production budgets. Ad intel also helps brands balance market expectations with creative differentiation: pairing familiar elements for credibility with less-familiar ones to grab attention or make ads more memorable. 

Informing brand expression across channels 

By revealing how competitors use visual identity, voice and other creative elements across channels, advertising intelligence can shape not just the look and feel of ads but also a broader brand strategy. This intertwining of creative and data is at the heart of brand strategy services. 

Seeing how competitors adapt their ads across platforms helps you understand which creative approaches work best where and suggests ways to ensure consistent, but not necessarily identical, brand expression. It also helps identify opportunities for cohesive cross-channel storytelling that competitors aren’t executing — or aren’t executing well. 

Balancing creative intuition and data 

Ad intelligence is meant to be a tool rather than a rulebook, and effective creative teams know how to balance data-driven insights with creative intuition and brand vision. They also know when to follow the data and when to trust their instincts; breakthrough creative defies market trends as often as it does conventional wisdom.  

The point is to use data to understand what’s working in the market, not to copy it. This understanding enables creative teams to craft distinctive, effective work from a position of knowledge. While advertising intelligence reveals what performed well in the past and is performing well now, the best creative and strategic teams know how to use those findings to design the future. 

Turn Advertising Intelligence Into Creative Strategy with Material 

Advertising intelligence is valuable. And when paired with creative expertise and strategic thinking, it becomes truly powerful. Competitive insights help inform differentiated brand strategies and creative work that boost revenue, command market share and generate customer loyalty. 

Material is deeply experienced at combining market intelligence with design strategy to build brands that stand out and boost your bottom line. Contact us today to learn how we can help you use ad intelligence to take your organization’s strategic and creative efforts to the next level.