Every Monday someone on the team asks a version of the same question: what are our competitors up to? The answer usually arrives days later, as a deck nobody reads.
It should arrive in Slack, on Monday morning, with the ads attached.
Here's a real one. Five Indian beauty and personal-care brands, one week, pulled from Marxx and written the way it would land in a channel.
🦷 Perfora launched whitening strips with a full funnel behind them.
Three ads in three days: a price-led launch ("the only long-term whitening your teeth have been waiting for"), a cart-abandon reminder ("still in cart?"), and a notification-style nudge. Not a test — a launch with retargeting already built.
💄 SUGAR is running a price floor, not a percentage.
"Flat ₹249 store" and "3 matte lipsticks @ ₹249", 6 and 9 days. A fixed price point reads as a destination you come back to; a percentage reads as a weekend.
☕ MCaffeine is bundling, and leaning on creators.
"Buy 3 @ ₹999" on the offer side, but the longer runner is a creator video — a get-ready-with-me shot on the way to a hospital visit, 19 days live.
🧴 Minimalist isn't discounting at all.
Step-by-step routine cards plus a creator video aimed at men who own no products. Education-led, no price in the hook.
🍃 Plum is selling the ingredient and the occasion, separately.
One ad leads on 99.99% niacinamide and a two-week timeframe; another is a creator getting ready for a cricket screening. Claim on one side, culture on the other.
What it means for us
Three of five are competing on price this week and two aren't — and the two that aren't own the formats with the longest runs. The gap: nobody in this set is running clinical or dermatologist proof. If we want an angle a ₹249 store can't undercut, that's where it is.
Everything in that message is real, and this is what the ads look like.
The ads behind the digest
Perfora: a launch with the funnel already attached
The interesting part isn't the launch ad, it's that a cart-abandon ad went live within days of it. That says the campaign was planned as a funnel rather than a post — and you only notice it if you're watching launches daily.
SUGAR: a price point, not a discount
"Flat ₹249" is a shelf you can come back to; "30% off" is a weekend. The difference is invisible in a spend report and obvious in a digest.
MCaffeine: the creator ad outlives the offer
Nineteen days for the creator video against a handful for the bundle ads. Same brand, same week, and the format that lasted is the one with a person in it.
Minimalist: education instead of a markdown
A whole week with no price in the hook. Worth flagging precisely because it's the opposite of what everyone else did — and because it's harder to copy than a discount.
Plum: the claim and the occasion, aimed at different people
A testable claim for people comparing formulas, and a cultural moment for people who weren't shopping at all. A digest reporting "Plum launched two ads" would have missed that they're aimed at different buyers.
The same digest, a different category
A channel tracks one category — that's the point of it. The signals don't change when the category does.
In home services, a paint brand running the same service ad for 67 days is telling you it answers a standing need rather than a seasonal one. In lending, a cluster of ads each naming a different deadline — the tax bill, the GST filing, quarter end — is a calendar strategy, and the digest catches it because three near-identical launches land in the same week. In quick commerce, the same free-delivery offer running city by city is a versioning play, not a national campaign.
Same three questions every Monday, whatever you sell: what launched, how hard is it backed, and what has quietly been running for months.
Why Slack, and not a dashboard
Nobody opens a competitor dashboard on a Tuesday. Everybody opens Slack.
| Dashboard | Slack |
|---|---|
| You have to remember to look | It arrives |
| One person sees it | The whole channel does, including the client |
| Findings die in a tab | They become a thread, then a brief |
| Weekly at best | Alerts the day something launches |
The other advantage is context. A digest in your #paid-social channel lands next to the creative you're already arguing about, so the reply is usually "can we do the occasion angle this week?" rather than "interesting".
What to pipe into the channel
| Alert | Cadence | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor launches | Daily or as it happens | Dated offers, like Timezone's 24–27 September window, only matter before they end |
| Scale signals | Weekly | Copy counts are the clearest sign of what a rival is backing |
| Creative fatigue on your own ads | Daily | A creative dropping off is worth knowing this week, not at the month-end review |
| Weekly digest | Monday morning | The five-line version above |
| New keywords rivals bid on | Weekly | They're buying your brand name before they tell you |
And what to leave out: every new ad from every brand. A channel that cries wolf gets muted in a fortnight. Send launches that are backed by copies, and anything with a date on it.
Ask it questions in the thread
A digest tells you what happened. The follow-up question is where the work is, and with Marxx MCP in Claude you can just ask, in the same thread:
What has this brand kept running longest this year?
Which of these five is discounting, and which isn't?
Show me every ad in this category that leads with an ingredient claim.
We asked the first one for this post. Across the five, the long runners aren't the offers: a creator video at 19 days, and in the wider category a haircare belief-challenge ad at 27, against three to nine days for most of the price-led work. A person on camera outlasts a price.
That's the useful shape of this workflow: Slack tells you what shipped, Claude tells you what it means, and the canvas turns it into an ad.
Setting it up
- Pick the five brands. Two direct rivals, two a size bigger, one you admire.
- Pick the channel. One per client or one per market. Not #general.
- Set the alerts. Launches as they happen, digest on Monday, fatigue alerts on your own account.
- Agree the rule. Every digest ends with one line: what we're doing about it. Otherwise it's a news feed.
- Keep the thread. The brief for next week's creative usually starts as a reply.
Marxx connects to Slack for alerts and digests, tracks Meta, Google and keyword activity, and hands the same data to Claude through the MCP. When a gap is worth acting on, it goes straight to the production canvas and out to Meta, paused.
Get this digest for your five competitors
On a 30-minute demo we'll set up your channel, add your five rivals, and run the first teardown live.
Book a demo and bring the brand names.
FAQs
What is a Slack bot for ad performance?
An app that posts ad data into Slack: your own campaign results, creative fatigue warnings, and what competitors launched. The point is that the information reaches people who'd never open a dashboard.
Can Slack show competitor ads?
Not on its own. It needs a tool that indexes public ad libraries and posts into your channel. The digest above is Meta ad data posted into Slack.
What should a weekly competitor digest include?
New launches, how many copies of each are running, dated offers, anything a rival has kept running for months, and one line on what you'll do about it.
How often should these alerts fire?
Launches as they happen, a digest weekly, fatigue alerts on your own ads daily. More than that and the channel gets muted.
Can I ask follow-up questions about the data?
Yes, if your tool exposes an MCP or API to an assistant. With Marxx in Claude, you can ask "what is this brand running longest?" and get an answer from live ad data.
Does this work for Google Ads too?
Yes. Marxx tracks Google advertisers and keywords alongside Meta, so the same digest can include "they started bidding on your brand name".