Spy for 99 francs

Published: 2024-03-29

Author: Gerda Ponzel

Dear entrepreneurs who have embarked on the intriguing game called “business,” it’s futile to think about how different you are from each other.

Certainly, you have different eye colors, different hair colors, product names, the product itself, and different approaches to conducting business. At the stage of idea conception and the initial stage of strengthening positions in the market for all the people in the world – your consumers, you are all absolutely the same.

You equally believe that your product rightfully and deservedly should instantly soar to the top of the trading Olympus on the shelves of the supermarket. You equally believe that you know how to build this business and equally do not want to make mistakes.

You equally appeal to investors and equally suffer from insomnia. You equally consider profits and losses, and equally pay taxes. Even your eyes at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey burn equally.

Do you know when you become different? At the moment when you decide that your company, your product, or you personally need advertising. Oh, how different you become…

“They must stumble over your product“ once said the person who built a business empire. It’s hard to argue with that.

And that’s why someone plans to spend all the working capital on advertising, someone invests only 1% in advertising their product. Someone immediately targets federal channels, someone prefers to build a loyalty policy, someone prefers gamification, and someone tries advertising hypotheses on well-known social platforms with a large audience.

Oh, how different you all are…

Some of you will immediately hire an advertiser with an excellent resume and a whole team of creative editors. This cohesive team will spend day and night composing scripts for your twenty-second advertising clips, crafting aphorisms from selling words, and writing slogans for all advertising posters. Writing a script for an advertising clip, or as it’s called in the advertising world – creative, is no different from writing an article in a magazine. First, the article will be corrected by a sub-editor, then an editor, then the chief editor, then it will be read and revised by all the mentioned individuals, and then – a focus group, compiled based on the analysis of your target audience, will read it, and there’s a 90 out of 100 chance that it will be printed at all. And then it will be repeated several times so that the world sees a greatly modified, very distant from the original idea, your twenty-second advertising creative. It’s maddening.

And yet, this is one of the reasons why one can easily fast-forward through advertisements without remorse – the illusion of simplicity. Everyone assumes that advertising, which boosts product ratings and sales figures mentioned in the press, is mocked on TV and dissected in analytical centers, can be effortlessly created. My foot!

Someone among you will still choose this path, and the fresh, juicy creative with a catchy headline and impeccable visuals, touched up in Photoshop, will go to all ADS managers, kindly prepared by giants of social platforms.

Different.

Another part of the players in the big business arena will choose a completely different strategy at the advertising baking stage. Observing.

And for this, players do not need to hire a special team of naive housewives who will scroll through the social media feed day and night in search of your advertising while watching TV and embroidering.

“The yogurt empire is guarded more strictly than a military facility!” Not even close.

It’s enough to visit a spy advertising tracking service, and your competitors will immediately know everything — from advertising campaign costs to every click. All data will be presented in a clear and naked form.

To find out the effectiveness of any advertising campaign? Sure.

Find all the most successful advertising announcements in a specific topic? Absolutely.

See the duration of the advertising creative, reactions, viewing and click statistics? Of course.

Track the entire business bundle as a whole? Easy.

Select effective ad combinations? Easily.

Borrow successful phrases and images? No problem.

Everything is available and transparent. And the brighter your advertising is, the more it makes your audience dream of new things and new happiness, the more piercing the advertising slogan is, the more accessible and transparent it is for all spy services.

Spy programs work like this: special robots collect advertising announcements and save them in a database. Then this data is analyzed to select suitable content for the advertising campaign. Many such tools have a filtering function that allows you to select ads based on various criteria, such as theme, keywords, location, and publication date.

And, essentially, such spy programs are not really spies because they collect data that is publicly available. After all, you wanted your advertising to be seen and for your product to stumble upon.

Indeed, why did your competitors suddenly start actively promoting a product imitator to capture part of your market share, thereby putting you face to face with real danger?

Even now, having practically read through this article to the end, each of you, participants in the large market, will react differently to the material presented in it.

Differently.

Some of you will create even more advertising to confuse the spying observers. Some of you will immediately convene a marketing meeting to radically change positioning. Some will defend their creative using domains — .com, .org, and .net. Others, to leave no chance for spies, will stop using text in the headlines of advertising announcements. Some will switch to the cloud instead of a dedicated server. And some will become observers themselves.

Who among you will ultimately win the battle for profit?  This question we’ll leave unanswered for now. Let’s meet after the advertising break.

Developer:

AdBeat: The service shows what ads are running in over 120 advertising networks.
AdClarity Display: Provides data for 40 top countries in the world for PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
AdMobiSpy: Covers 52 countries and 5 ad formats (banners, native, text ads, and more). Offers 15 different filters and the ability to download ad materials with one click.
AdPlexity: Offers 5 of the most popular ad formats (mobile, desktop, native, push, enterprise) and covers 75 countries. Provides useful technical data (OS, audience, and much more).
AdVault: Advertising from 19 countries and 13 ad networks with native traffic.