For ad buyers, by ad buyers
The Breakdown: live ad teardowns from AdSkills, 3x a week
Get the next breakdown
The ritual
A live winner, not a museum piece. Ads that are still running, still spending, still converting (some past 100 days in market).
A principle before the teardown. Loss aversion. Burning platforms. Share signals. Creative hit rates. You leave with a rule, not just a cool example.
A numbered autopsy. Hook. Structure. Proof. Why the scroller stays. Why the click stays congruent with the page.
One Steal This. A portable move you can brief the same day.
How I’d Beat It. A concrete A/B against the same ad, so you practice competitive creative, not fanboy screenshots.
Specific numbers. Hit rates, spend, days live, view counts, price objections. Vague praise gets cut.
From the desk
Three ads. Three decisions worth stealing.
Oats Overnight opens on “Do not buy Oats Overnight…” then flips into a numbered benefits list. Prospect Theory in three seconds: a warning holds attention a promise can’t. Open with a category warning, cash in with the list, keep the cuts fast.
Legends doesn’t sell chronic parenting stress. It shows three holes in drywall and a sticky note that says “sry mom, i hate myself.” Chronic pain gets “maybe later.” Acute pain gets the click.
Motion’s 2026 benchmarks covered $1.29B in Meta spend and 578,750 creatives. Text-only hit rate: 11.6%. UpAiry’s wet-vs-dry toddler pants photo runs under a mom-hacks page while 500 words of caption do the selling. Make the image look like a group post. Let the caption be the landing page.
Reader profile
Media buyers. Performance marketers. Creative strategists. Agency owners. Founders who still approve the ads.
If you live in Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads, or Google, and you’re tired of “inspiration” that never turns into a brief, you’re the reader.
Who’s behind it
AdSkills trains people who want paid ads done right.
Justin Brooke has been in paid ads since March 2007. The Breakdown sits inside that world: auction pressure, creative fatigue, briefs that have to ship.
Each issue reads like a creative strategist talking to another pro. One ad. Opened to the bone.
Before you ask
Oh right, because scrolling ads is the same thing as expert analysis. Maybe, you're better off just asking ChatGPT to do your homework. This is grown up stuff here mate.
No. This assumes you know what a hook, pattern interrupt, or how the PAS copywriting framework works. New to paid ads? Just dive in and learn as you go. You want to run with the big boys right?
Three emails a week. One ad each. Skim in sixty seconds or read the full autopsy.
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