×Upspring
My creative strategy is only as good as what I know about the category and the creative we're running. Upspring's in every report I do: what to shift, what to keep, where the whitespace is. That's the difference between scaling creative and hitting a wall.Casey FallonCreative Director · brand.co
About brand.co
brand.co runs creative strategy for a portfolio of brands like Oats Overnight, Casper and Bezel. The job is to decide what to make next: which angles to push, which to retire, and where a category has left room nobody is using.
Those decisions rest on two bodies of knowledge. What their own creative is doing across every client, and what the rest of the category is running right now. Both have to be current, and both have to be legible to more than one person's memory.
Strategy is capped by what you can see.
A creative director can only reason over what they've actually looked at. Ads are video, images, copy, and landing pages, so looking at them means watching them, one at a time, per brand, every month.
You can't filter, group, or compare what only exists as video and images.
Every client in the portfolio is its own manual pass, and it resets when campaigns rotate.
Hours spent assembling the picture are hours not spent deciding what to do about it.
Scale is where this bites. One brand is manageable. A portfolio means the research either gets shallow or the reports get late, and both cost the same thing: the strategist's attention.
Two surfaces, one data layer.
brand.co uses Upspring in both places the work happens.
Over MCP, the exploratory questions get answered in chat. What is this category running, who is scaling, what claims are crowded, what formats are the top spenders converging on. It's the fast pass, in plain language, with no tool to open first.
Through the API, the same data goes straight into their reporting. Advertisers, live ads, creative attributes, and scale grades from D to A+ arrive as structured records, so the client-facing view is generated rather than assembled by hand.
The important part is that both draw on one layer. What Casey finds in a chat and what appears in the report are the same data, not two research efforts that have to be reconciled.
Every creative, back as text.
Upspring processes each ad into readable, comparable attributes: the hook, the claim, the offer, the format, the page behind the click. A video stops being something you have to watch and becomes something you can query.
That changes what a report can contain. Instead of a handful of examples someone had time to review, it holds the category, filtered and grouped, with the advertisers behind it graded so a serious spender is easy to tell from a test. And it costs a fraction of the context, since processed creative runs up to 10x lighter than raw video and pages.
The output is the same question every time, answered faster: what to shift, what to keep, where the whitespace is.
Strategy that scales with the portfolio.
The research work no longer grows linearly with the number of brands, so adding a client does not mean adding a week of manual scanning.
The judgment stays with the strategist. What changed is how much of the category that judgment gets to stand on.