The Format Grid That Wins
🧭 Spot proven creative assets with Tactical Transparency, Meta Instagram, LinkedIn change how analytics work, and more!
Howdy Readers 🥰
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
🔍 Tactical Transparency: The Competitive Content Teardown System No One’s Using
📊 Meta, Instagram, and LinkedIn Roll Out New Tracking Updates
🏆 Ad of the Day
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🔍 Tactical Transparency: The Competitive Content Teardown System No One’s Using
Great content isn’t just consistent. It’s deliberate.
Most marketers “watch the feed” for trends. But high-performing brands play a different game: they spend strategically behind very specific formats. It’s not aesthetic, it’s intent made visible.
This is Tactical Transparency, a teardown system that goes beyond what your competitors post to uncover what they back with dollars, how often, and why.
📊 The Format × Spend Grid (FxS Grid)
Every post lives at the intersection of two variables:
This grid reveals what formats are treated as growth assets vs engagement fluff.
Example: Kosas vs Rare Beauty
AdClarity shows Rare spends heavily on short, UGC-styled testimonial carousels. Kosas, in contrast, allocates most spend to polished reel-style demo videos with offer overlays.
Same category. Different trust levers. Different spending strategy.
👉 If they’re spending behind a carousel, not a reel, it’s not a mistake. It’s a format vote.
Use SEMrush AdClarity to:
Track creative performance by format, duration, and placement
Spot which campaigns run 4–6 weeks = proven assets
Analyze platform fragmentation (Reel on Instagram vs Carousel on Meta vs Testimonial on YouTube)
You’re not just spying, you’re decoding creative conviction. Start your 7-day free trial to see what your category is really scaling.
Strategic Payoff
Use the FxS Grid to guide creative testing: duplicate what they’re spending on, ignore what they post once, and abandon
Rebrief creators around formats that align with buy-ready spend behavior, not just likes
Identify white space: formats your category won’t spend behind = room for disruption
Why This Wins
Organic tells you what they want you to see. Paid reveals what they believe will work. Spend is a strategy made visible.
Tactical Transparency lets you reverse-engineer not just content style, but performance conviction. That’s how world-class marketers out-position the competition, one format at a time.
📊 Meta, Instagram, and LinkedIn Roll Out New Tracking Updates
The way social platforms measure and report engagement is shifting fast. Meta is consolidating metrics into a single view, Instagram may count screenshots as a sign of deeper attention, and LinkedIn is making post analytics more real-time.
The Breakdown:
1 - LinkedIn adds rolling post analytics - LinkedIn will now send automatic alerts 3 and 7 days after you post. These notifications show impressions, profile visits, and followers gained from that specific post, letting you see how content drives response over time.
2 - Meta consolidates metrics into “Views” - Meta is officially retiring impressions and page fans from the Page Insights API. From now on, “views” will be the single metric across Facebook and Instagram, covering all content types in a consistent way. Any call for the old metrics will now return an error, so third-party tools will also default to views as the main stat.
3 - Instagram may track screenshots - Instagram chief Adam Mosseri confirmed they’re exploring the idea of adding screenshots as a new engagement metric. If implemented, you’d be able to see how often posts are captured and shared outside the app.
Instead of juggling scattered stats, you’ll now track content through unified views (Meta), possible new engagement layers (Instagram), and real-time post impact signals (LinkedIn). These tweaks directly affect how you measure reach, what counts as engagement, and when you act on performance data.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works and Insights:
1 Playful exaggeration in headline – “So plush, you’ll want to sleep in the tub” works because it’s funny, relatable, and amplifies comfort through absurdity. It makes the towels feel indulgent rather than just functional. This playful tone could be extended into a series of lifestyle exaggerations, creating a campaignable voice beyond one-off copy.
2 Texture as the hero visual – The close-up of stacked towels shows softness through folds, shadows, and color. The image lets you almost “feel” the product before touching it. Future iterations could heighten this sensory pull by layering subtle motion or ASMR-style video to make texture the centerpiece.
3 Clear brand voice consistency – Brooklinen’s line “Best in Bed” ties back seamlessly to their larger brand promise. This creates continuity from core products (sheets) to adjacent ones (towels). Brands maintaining this kind of thread across categories grow trust by reinforcing one big brand idea rather than fragmenting messaging.
Broader Insights:
This ad shows how turning a functional product into an emotional lifestyle promise can elevate even everyday essentials. By framing towels as an indulgence that changes how you feel rather than just what you use, the brand taps into aspiration, not utility.
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