Why we built BrandMov

The Meta Ads Library is free. So we tried that first.

It's painfully slow. Filters are broken half the time. There's no way to save an ad, no way to get notified when a brand launches something new, no way to pick up where you left off. Every session starts from scratch. You scroll, you screenshot, you paste into a doc nobody else can use.

It's a compliance tool dressed up as a research tool. Meta built it because regulators told them to which means it's designed around auditability, not workflow.

The more serious tools are real products. Foreplay especially.

By the time we started building, the space had moved on from the old discovery databases. Foreplay in particular had built toward a complete creative workflow: swipe files, competitor tracking, briefs, analytics, collaboration across teams, multi-channel support. If you’re coordinating a performance team and a creative team at a growing agency, that platform makes sense.

But most of the people we talked to weren’t running that operation. They were solo media buyers, small DTC operators, freelancers managing a handful of client accounts. They didn’t need briefs, analytics, or a mobile app. They needed to know what the three or four brands they cared about had launched this week on Meta and to save the ads worth saving.

For that job, those tools are either more platform than you need or more expensive than the job justifies. So people end up solving it themselves.

Everyone has some version of the same system.

Talk to any media buyer doing this seriously and they have a Notion doc or Google Sheet. Brand names in one column, ad library URLs in another, a “last checked” date, maybe screenshots pasted in. They open each URL manually, scroll through, screenshot anything interesting, close the tab, repeat.

It takes an hour or two, a few times a week. It works until it doesn’t until the brand you weren’t watching this week ran a new creative test, found a winner, and scaled it while you were looking elsewhere.

Nobody built a tool that just watches brands for you.

Not a database of every ad ever run. Not a scraper that indexes volume. Just a clean, fast interface on top of Meta’s own public data with the features that should have been there from the start.

Pull up any brand’s active ads instantly. Save the ones worth saving, tagged and organised. Follow a brand and get notified when they launch new creative. Actually find what you saved six weeks later.

It’s not revolutionary. It’s just what the tool should have been.