×Upspring
Upspring gives us a much clearer view of what's happening across a category. Instead of going through competitors one by one, we can quickly understand the players, messaging, and creative patterns shaping the market.AndrewCo-founder · Igloo Media
About Igloo Media
Igloo Media is a marketing agency that plans and runs performance campaigns for brands across a range of categories. Their value to a client starts before any creative is made: knowing the market the brand is competing in, and knowing it well enough to place a bet.
That means competitive research is not a side task. It's the foundation of the recommendation, and it has to hold up for every client, in every category, every month.
One competitor at a time doesn't scale.
The default way to understand a category is to work through it name by name. Open a competitor's ad library, scroll their creative, note the angles, move on. Then repeat, for as many rivals as you have patience for.
Each competitor is its own manual pass, and the work resets when campaigns rotate.
You only ever see the advertisers you already thought to look up.
A stack of individual scans is not the same as a read on the market.
The last one is the real cost. Patterns live between advertisers, in the claim three brands adopted this quarter or the format the top spenders all moved to. Studying rivals one by one is exactly the method least likely to surface them.
The category as one queryable thing.
Upspring collects live ads across every major platform and turns the creative into structured, comparable data, then resolves and grades the advertisers behind it on spend, traffic, and sales.
So Igloo Media stopped assembling a category out of individual scans and started querying it directly. Who is actually advertising here, what are they claiming, which formats and offers are showing up most, and which of these advertisers carry real weight.
The advertisers they never thought to check show up alongside the ones they did. That's usually where the interesting part is.
From a list of rivals to a read on the market.
The work looks different at both ends. Early in an engagement, the team can get to a defensible view of a new category in an afternoon rather than a week, without knowing the landscape in advance.
Later, when the question is about the next campaign, the same data answers it. What messaging is crowded, what's underused, which creative patterns the serious spenders are converging on. The recommendation gets grounded in the market rather than in whichever three competitors happened to get looked at.
Faster to a clearer picture.
Igloo Media covers more ground with less manual research, and the picture they hand clients is about the category rather than a sample of it.
The judgment is still the agency's. What changed is how much of the market that judgment gets to see.