The median ad dies in 34 days. 237 of the ads we track are older than two years.
The one read
We measured the lifespan of 3,819 ads across 97 growing companies. Half die within a month; one in seven runs over a year. An ad that survives is revealed conversion data, and reading a competitor's oldest ads takes ten minutes and costs nothing.
Ask a paid-media person how long an ad creative lives and you'll hear days. Test fast, fatigue fast, kill fast, next. The tooling, the agencies, the entire creative-testing industry is built on the assumption that ads are disposable.
Our data says half of that story is missing.
We track the public ad libraries of the companies we break down, one company per day. Across 3,819 ads from 97 growing companies: the median ad is gone within 34 days. So far, the disposable theory holds.
But 579 of those ads, about one in seven, have run for over a year. 237 have run for over two. And a cluster of ads from Deel, Dreamdata, The Farmer's Dog and Primally Pure are pinned at the very edge of what the ad archives can even see, roughly 1,716 days, meaning they have been running for at least four and a half years. Nobody knows how much longer, because the archive's memory ends there.
Half of all ads die in a month. A meaningful slice runs for years. The gap between those two numbers is the most underpriced signal in marketing.
Why survival is the signal
An ad that keeps running is an ad someone keeps paying for, every single day, with real money, while watching the numbers. Advertisers kill losers fast precisely because spend is real. So longevity is not a vanity metric that can be gamed or bought. It is revealed truth: the closest thing to seeing a competitor's conversion data without being in their ad account.
62% of the companies we track have at least one ad that has survived a full year. Those ads are each company's proven angle, sitting in a public archive, readable by anyone for free.
What the long-runners have in common
Reading across our set, the ads that survive years cluster into recognizable jobs:
- The question that never fatigues. Medicube has run "What Makes Your Skin Look Lifeless?" as a paid opener for 1,202 days. Caraway has a hook at 1,286 days and still spending. Questions aimed at a persistent pain don't wear out, because the audience keeps refreshing itself with people who feel it.
- The plain text ad on the hero product. Spacegoods has a Google text ad at roughly 1,115 days. Beam, whose teardown went out this morning, concentrates its longest runners (up to 483 days) on Dream, its hero sleep powder. Boring format, single product, permanent search demand.
- Brand-term defense. LocalRank has run one Google ad for 388 days that does nothing but hold its own brand name. An ad like that tells you the company knows exactly which searches it cannot afford to lose, usually because a competitor tried to take them.
- Concrete numbers and cost comparisons. Across the set, long-lived copy leans on specifics ("280M pads sold") and price-of-alternatives framing far more than clever wordplay. The market votes for receipts.
How to read a competitor's proven angles in ten minutes
This is the part you can run today, for free, on any company:
- Open the Meta Ad Library (facebook.com/ads/library) and the Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com). Search the brand.
- Ignore everything recent. New ads are experiments; you'd be studying their guesses.
- Find the oldest "started running" dates. Anything past ~90 days survived real scrutiny. Anything past a year is a proven winner, full stop.
- Read those old ads as a list of claims: the hook, the objection it answers, the offer structure. That list is the company's converting playbook, published in public.
- Check whether they run a brand-term defense ad. If they do, search their brand name yourself and see who else is bidding. That's the competitive battlefield they're already fighting on.
The newest ads tell you what a company is testing. The oldest tell you what works. Most people only ever look at the newest.
Where this comes from
We publish one evidence-based breakdown a day of how a growing company acquires customers at systemaic.com, and the live aggregate numbers are at systemaic.com/data.
Methodology notes, honestly stated: run-times come from the public ad libraries (Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, LinkedIn Ad Library), measured first-shown to last-shown at collection time, bound to verified company pages and domains. The ~1,716-day cluster sits at the archives' visibility horizon, so those ads are at least that old; the true figure could be higher. A long run-time proves an ad ran continuously, not necessarily that it is still live the moment you read this. The 97 companies skew toward currently-growing SaaS and DTC brands, because that's what we cover.