How to Recreate a Competitor's Ad for Your Brand (Legally)

You can recreate a competitor ad for your brand, and the line is simpler than the internet makes it sound. Copyright covers what they made, not what they worked out. Their photograph, their sentences and their logo belong to them. The order of the elements, the type of hook, the decision to hang a benefit off a line pointing at the jar: none of that belongs to anybody.

Most people get this backwards. They lift a headline word for word because it is only text, then worry about whether they are allowed to put their own product in the middle of the frame with two callouts around it. The first is the real risk. The second is a layout, and a layout is a method.

Yes, if you take the thinking and leave the artefact. Advertising has been squarely inside copyright since Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing in 1903, when the Supreme Court held that a picture does not lose protection for being made to sell something. So their creative is protected work. What is protected is the specific expression of it, not the reasoning behind it.

Here is a MAËLYS Cosmetics ad, pulled out of the AIMS library, running on Meta this summer. I have marked the six decisions in it. Every one is a choice somebody made on purpose, and none of them are owned by anybody.

Six decisions, none of them protected

1

2

3

4

5

6

1

The wordmark is tiny. It sits centred at the very top and then gets out of the way. The brand is not the hero of the ad.

2

The offer lives inside the headline. One serif sentence, with the discount italicised at the end of it, instead of a starburst stuck in a corner.

3

The first benefit hangs off a leader line. It is pinned to the jar it belongs to, so you never have to work out which claim is about which product.

4

Two products, set on a diagonal, lids off. You can see the texture of both creams, which is the thing a body care buyer is actually assessing.

5

The second benefit balances the first. Opposite corner, same treatment. The two lines frame the products between them.

6

The call to action is the only warm colour on the ad. An orange badge in the bottom left, which is where the thumb already is.

Write those six lines down and you have a brief. Notice that you can hand that brief to somebody who has never seen the ad and they could build a version of it, which is the test for whether you have taken the method rather than the artwork.

Which ads are worth the effort

• It has been live for weeks. Longevity is the only free performance signal you get.
• It carries one idea. If you need three sentences to describe it, it will not survive translation.
• The product is visible and large. Ads built around a mood do not transfer to a different brand.
• The structure is doing work a headline could not do on its own.
• It comes from a brand roughly your size, so the production values are reachable.

The failure mode is not caution, it is speed. Somebody screenshots the ad, cuts out their own product, drops it over the top and ships it. Below is roughly what that produces. I generated this one, because nobody wants their real work used as the bad example.

Here is that MAËLYS ad used properly. On the left, the original. On the right, what AIMS built for Loud Bite, who sell popped lentil chips, from the same reference and a photograph of their own range. Body cream to snacks, which is about as far as a category can travel.

Reference on the left, rebuild on the right

The reference

The rebuild

What carried across

1

Small centred wordmark, then straight into the headline

2

Two line headline, the second line lighter than the first

3

Product group centred, angled, filling the middle third

4

One benefit on a leader line from the upper left

5

A second on the lower right, balancing it

6

Orange call to action badge, bottom left corner

Image models have got extremely good at making things, and can hold a product almost perfectly now. What they have never had is judgement. Ask one for "a static ad for my body wash" and you get the average of every ad it has seen, a centred bottle on a gradient, because it has no opinion about where the benefit should sit.

A finished ad from a real designer contains all of those decisions already. That is the whole trick. You are not asking the model to have taste, you are handing it the record of somebody else having had it, then letting it do the part it is genuinely better at, which is producing the thing twenty times without getting bored.

This is what AIMS is for. The library is a free searchable archive of real ads, emails, videos and pins from Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Amazon and Etsy, which is where the MAËLYS ad came from, and the free Chrome extension saves anything you find while browsing straight into it. Pick something worth learning from and AIMS does the teardown step itself, then hands that analysis to the model with your product photography and your palette. The teardown page walks through the loop. What comes back is your ad with their structure and none of their assets.