Competitive Ad Teardown Pro

What you get: a structured workflow that turns a stuck problem into a repeatable routine, delivering ready-to-use artifacts and templates.

Overview

[TRACE 5.0 positioning] This skill is a hands-on tool. It ships reusable artifacts and templates, not generic advice. The original GitHub skill extracts competitor advertising signals from publicly available creative. The Pro version turns scattered samples into a managed asset: a structured creative library (filed by channel, format, hook type and audience tier), a selling-point extraction engine (reducing ad copy to value proposition, evidence type and emotional trigger), and a gap matrix showing where you and competitors overlap or leave open space.

What I can do

• Break down a single ad: hook (first three seconds or first line), core promise, supporting evidence, audience signals, call to action, format and pacing, visual motif, each tagged into the library.
• Build a creative library: file multiple samples into a searchable table with channel, observed run period (from public information), creative type, main appeal, audience hypothesis and reuse score.
• Extract selling points: reduce each ad to a quadruple of value proposition, evidence type, target segment and emotional trigger, revealing whether the competitor leads with efficiency, price, expertise, identity or risk avoidance.
• Gap matrix: appeals as rows, competitors as columns, highlighting unoccupied appeals, crowded lanes, and strengths you already have but never articulate.
• Format inventory: tally common opening structures, narrative patterns and evidence presentation (data, case, endorsement, demo, comparison), yielding reusable expression skeletons (structure only; your copy and assets must be original).
• Your differentiation proposals: three to five candidate positioning statements, each with required evidence, channel fit, asset format suggestions and a testable plan (A/B hypothesis and observation metrics).

What I cannot do

• I do not access login-gated, explicitly automation-restricted or paywalled content; I work from material you supply and publicly viewable ad-library entries.
• I do not copy competitor copy, slogans or visual assets, and I do not produce content imitating another party's trademark, trade dress or attribution; output stays at the structural level plus your original proposals.
• I do not estimate non-public figures such as competitor budgets or true conversion rates; only publicly visible signals are recorded.
• I do not write exaggerated or unsupported claims; every selling point must rest on verifiable material you provide.

Trigger phrases

competitor ads, ad teardown, creative analysis, creative library, selling-point extraction, value proposition, differentiation positioning, ad assets, ad copy analysis, hook analysis, competitor comparison, gap analysis, appeal matrix, expression skeleton, campaign strategy review

Input spec

Provide: (1) competitor list and a short description of your product; (2) ad material (copy text, described visuals, transcribed video scripts, or excerpts from a public ad library); (3) target market and audience; (4) your verifiable strengths and evidence (data, cases, credentials, customer feedback); (5) purpose (choose positioning / write creative / find white space); (6) optional: channel constraints, industry wording standards, expressions to avoid.

Output spec

Deliver a Markdown analysis containing:

1. Sample ledger: ID, competitor, channel, creative type, hook, core promise, evidence type, call to action.
2. Selling-point map: clustered by appeal dimension, with each competitor's primary and secondary lines.
3. Gap matrix: appeal by competitor coverage, with white space and crowded lanes highlighted.
4. Expression skeleton library: reusable structural templates (never another party's text), each tagged by fit.
5. Differentiation proposals: three to five statements with evidence requirements, channel fit and asset formats.
6. Validation plan: hypotheses, control design, metrics to watch and how to read them.

Examples

Example 1

Input: "We sell corporate training SaaS. Here are eight competitor ads. What are they all pushing?" Output: An eight-row sample ledger; a selling-point map showing five ads leading with headcount cost savings, two with compliance training completion, one with executive endorsement; a gap matrix identifying "frontline staff actually finishing the course" as unoccupied while "cheaper price" is crowded; an expression skeleton library distilling three opening structures (pain-point question, data contrast, scenario replay); a differentiation proposal centered on completion behavior as the core promise, listing the evidence you must supply (real completion data and customer cases); a validation plan with two landing-page variants and the metrics to watch.

Example 2

Input: "The same competitor runs very different creative on three channels. How should I read that?" Output: A channel comparison table: short video leans on a three-second conflict plus demo, feed ads lean on concrete numbers and time-bound information, search leans on exact keywords and feature lists; their layered strategy is reconstructed as an awareness-interest-decision hand-off; a weakness is flagged at the decision stage (no trust evidence, no customer cases); your counter-plan and asset-format checklist follow.

Example 3

Input: "Here's an ad I wrote. How does it compare to the competitors?" Output: Item-by-item comparison: hook (yours opens with self-introduction while competitors open with the customer's situation, so rewrite from the situation); promise (yours is abstract with no verifiable boundary, so scope it to a segment and scenario); evidence (absent, so add one publicly shareable customer result with permission obtained); call to action (vague, so reduce it to one clear action); output includes three rewritten versions with channel fit and a reminder that every claim must match your actual capability.

Error handling

• Too few samples (fewer than three): note that conclusions will be weakly grounded, deliver a deep single-sample teardown, and suggest widening the sample.
• Unclear material provenance: request the source and how it was obtained; anything whose lawful use cannot be confirmed is excluded from analysis.
• Competitors positioned very differently from you: flag the mismatch and suggest re-selecting benchmarks in the same price band or audience.
• You lack verifiable evidence: no unsupported claims are written; an evidence-gap list is delivered with paths to obtain it (customer interviews, pilot data, third-party evaluation).
• Regulated wording in your industry (finance, healthcare, education): flag the need for review under industry standards and deliver a conservative wording variant.

Limitations and disclaimer

This skill performs structured analysis of the material you supply and publicly visible information only. It does not obtain non-public data and does not estimate competitors' actual campaign results. Conclusions are interpretive and may not reflect a competitor's real strategy. Output offers method-level structure and your original proposals; do not reuse another party's copy, slogans, graphics or trademarks, and confirm licensing for any third-party asset yourself. All external claims must match your actual product capability and comply with advertising standards and platform rules; have legal or compliance review them where necessary. No campaign outcome is promised.

Pro upgrade roadmap (Pay Skill reserved)

Billing will be enabled once the individual-creator payment channel goes live. Free tier: deep teardown of one sample plus basic selling-point extraction. Pro tier: persistent creative library with cross-project accumulation and tag-based retrieval; batch teardown and clustering in one pass; auto-generated gap matrices refreshed on a cadence with change highlights; full expression skeleton library with scenario-matched recommendations; differentiation proposal and validation plan template pack; multi-market and multi-language comparative analysis; compliance wording pre-check list; priority support and strategy review. Upgrade path: one click to Pro once the billing channel opens.

Operating procedure (5 standard steps)

1. Prepare input: gather requirement keywords and business context.
2. Configure parameters: set required parameters per this document (input, output format, constraints).
3. Run: invoke this skill and follow the documented order.
4. Accept results: check against the expected results and boundary conditions.
5. Reuse: save the successful template as a shortcut for next time.

Scenarios and triggers

Use this skill whenever you need, want, or are stuck on the following: High-frequency scenarios:

• Mapping what everyone in the category is saying before a launch
• Running out of creative ideas and needing structural references
• Hunting for an appeal that nobody has claimed yet
• Settling an internal argument about your core selling point
• Deciding whether to follow a competitor's new angle
• Expressing one product across several channels in layered ways
• Diagnosing decent clicks but poor conversion, suspecting promise-page mismatch
• Turning scattered competitor samples into a searchable asset
• Presenting the competitive landscape to leadership on one page
• Testing whether your differentiation is genuinely different
• Identifying exactly which evidence you still need to gather
• Understanding local expression habits before entering a new market
• Evaluating agency proposals with a consistent framework
• Establishing archiving conventions so past creative gets reused
• Designing a set of testable campaign experiments
• Producing a conservative copy version that fits industry wording rules Typical users: marketing and growth leads, brand and content strategists, performance marketers, founders and product owners, agency strategists, business analysts doing competitive work.