There's an advert I've never forgotten. I was eleven when I first saw it, sitting in the living room with my dad. Allied Dunbar life insurance. The song started, "There may be trouble ahead…", and my dad sang along every time.
I didn't understand what Allied Dunbar was selling. I didn't care about life insurance at eight years old. But I understood the feeling. Something bad is coming. You should probably do something about it.
That ad ran in 1995. I can still picture it now, thirty years later. The song. The message. The way it made you feel slightly uneasy about the future.
Here's what I didn't know until years later: That campaign was one of the most successful in British advertising history. The song got into the top 20. TV shows spoofed it. Football fans sang it when a free-kick was given against them. Tube drivers sang it when there was a delay on the line. David Beckham sings it while getting dressed for his wedding in the recent Beckham documentary. Allied Dunbar's brand awareness jumped from 69% to 83%, and the company went from the 7th largest insurer to the 3rd.
That's what a great ad does. It lodges in culture. It becomes part of how people talk, joke, reference the world around them. And it moves the needle on the numbers that actually matter.
The FCA would probably never approve an ad like that today. They'd call it scaremongering. Maybe they'd be right. But here's the thing: it worked. It lodged in my brain and stayed there for decades. It became part of my internal library — the collection of ads, hooks, and emotional angles I draw from whenever I sit down to write.
Everyone has this library. You've absorbed thousands of ads in your life, whether you realise it or not. Some stuck. Most didn't. The ones that stuck are data points. They're evidence of what works.
This chapter is about building that library deliberately. Not waiting for ads to stumble into your memory, but actively studying what competitors are doing, understanding why it works, and extracting principles you can apply to your own campaigns.
Competitor intelligence is the practice of systematically studying what other businesses in your market are running, their ads, landing pages, offers, and funnels, to learn from their proven successes and avoid their obvious failures.
It's not about copying. Copying is lazy and usually backfires because you don't understand why something worked. Copying a competitor's ad without understanding the strategy is like photocopying someone else's lottery ticket and expecting to win.
It's about pattern recognition. When you see the same message, the same structure, the same emotional angle appearing across multiple competitors over months or years, that's a signal. The market has tested it for you.
In the last chapter, you learned how to extract the language your customers actually use. Voice of Customer research gives you the words, the raw material. But you're not the first person to try selling to this market. Others have been at it for years, spending their own money, testing their own hypotheses, learning what converts and what doesn't.
That's valuable data. And unlike their sales figures or conversion rates, most of it is sitting in plain sight.
Every ad running on Meta is visible in the Ad Library. Every competitor's landing page is one click away. Their offers, their pricing, their positioning, all public. The market is essentially running a massive distributed A/B test, and you can see the results.
There are three reasons this matters.
First, it reduces your learning cost. Remember the uncomfortable truth from Chapter 1: you have to pay to learn. That's still true. But you don't have to learn everything from scratch. If a competitor has been running the same ad for three months, they've already validated that angle. You can start from a higher baseline and iterate from there instead of beginning at zero.