Agencies don't do creative research the way most solo advertisers do. They don't scroll through their feed, screenshot something, and drop it in a Slack channel. They have a system. And the system is why their creatives consistently outperform accounts where the research is improvised.
If you're running Facebook ads alone or with a small team, you can steal most of this without hiring a creative strategist. Here's how it actually works inside a performance agency.
Why agencies systematize research
A mid-sized performance agency might run 30 to 60 active client accounts at once. Each account needs fresh creative every few weeks. That's a production problem. You can't solve it by having media buyers individually browse the Meta Ad Library when they feel like it.
The answer is to make research a scheduled, structured activity with defined outputs. Not optional. Not ad hoc. A weekly process with clear owners, clear deliverables, and a library that builds over time.
The typical agency research stack
Most agencies pull from a few sources: the Meta Ad Library for organic competitor discovery, ad intelligence tools for volume and spend signals, and their own internal library of saved ads from past clients and campaigns.
The Meta Ad Library is free but slow. You can see what's running, but you can't filter by spend or how long an ad has been active. That's where tools like Spreshapp's ad browser come in. You get the library plus filters that let you spot what's actually working versus what just launched yesterday.
The internal library is the most underrated part. Agencies that have been around for a few years have thousands of saved ads across dozens of categories. That's a compounding advantage. When a new client comes in, a good creative strategist doesn't start from scratch. They search the library first. Building that kind of structured library is what separates a swipe file from a real intelligence asset.
How research gets turned into briefs
This is where most solo advertisers break down. They find good ads. They save them somewhere. Then they never use them because they don't know what to do next.
Agencies convert research into briefs. A brief is not "here are some ads I liked." It's a document that tells a creator exactly what to do: the hook format, the problem being addressed, the offer framing, the tone, the length, and a reference example with notes on why it works.
The research is the input. The brief is the output. Everything in between is analysis: why does this ad work? What's the hook doing? What problem is it leading with? Who is the target audience? That analysis lives in the library, attached to the saved ad, so anyone can pull it up and use it later.
Creative strategist vs media buyer: who does what
In an agency, these are different roles with different focuses. Media buyers manage spend, structure campaigns, and read performance data. Creative strategists research competitors, write briefs, and analyze what's working in the feed.
The creative strategist is the person doing most of the research. They're watching competitor brands weekly, tracking which ads stay active (a signal of profitability), and connecting patterns across industries. They're not just collecting ads. They're building a point of view on what's working and why.
Solo advertisers collapse both roles into one person. That's fine. But you need to be intentional about switching hats. Research time is research time. Don't let it bleed into campaign management.
The weekly research cadence
Most agencies do a structured research session once a week per client vertical. It's usually 45 to 90 minutes. The output is a small set of saves: five to ten ads that are worth keeping, each tagged with category, hook type, format, and notes.
Here's a rough breakdown of what gets reviewed each week:
- Two to three direct competitors, checking for new ads and what's staying active
- One or two adjacent categories that target similar audiences
- Any ads from the past two weeks flagged by the media buyer as unusually high or low CTR
The saves go into the library with tags and notes. The best ones get pulled into a "brief queue" for the following production cycle.
How solo advertisers can steal this
You don't need a creative strategist on staff. You need a calendar block and a system.
Block 60 minutes once a week. Spend 30 minutes on competitor research using Spreshapp's competitor tracking. Save the ads worth keeping with notes on what caught your attention. Spend the other 30 minutes reviewing your saves from the last two weeks and pulling two or three into a brief.
The brief doesn't have to be elaborate. A paragraph describing the hook angle, a sentence on the offer framing, and a link to the reference ad is enough for most creators to start from.
What you're building, slowly, is an institutional memory. Your library gets more useful every week. In six months you'll have a searchable ad intelligence database of what's worked in your category. That's the actual advantage agencies have over you right now.
Using Spreshapp as your solo research system
Spreshapp is built around this workflow. You can track competitor domains and see every ad they're running. You can save ads from the Meta Ad Library in one click using the Chrome extension. Saved ads go into your library where you can tag them, add notes, and search by format or brand later.
That covers the research and storage parts. The brief-writing still takes human judgment. But if your library is organized and searchable, the research phase of brief-writing drops from 30 minutes to five. You already have the examples. You just need to select and annotate.
The brief template that turns research into direction
If you want a starting point, here's a minimal brief structure that works for most Facebook video ads:
- Hook format: Text overlay, talking head, B-roll with VO, or something else
- Opening line: First 3 seconds, written out verbatim
- Problem: What pain point or desire is the ad addressing
- Offer framing: How the product is presented as the solution
- Tone: Casual, urgent, documentary, testimonial, etc.
- Reference ads: Two or three saved examples with notes on what to borrow
You can write this in a doc, a Notion page, or a comment on the saved ad itself. The format doesn't matter much. What matters is that someone can read it cold and know exactly what to make.
That's the real lesson from how agencies do this. Research without a brief is just hoarding. The brief is what makes research worth doing.
If you want to see what a proper creative research workflow looks like in practice, the creative testing system guide covers how to connect research to production and measurement in a repeatable loop.