Open a display ad from a credit card company, a financial newspaper, a magazine subscription service, and a smart-home gadget startup, and you’ll notice something odd: they’re all speaking the same language. Not the same product, not the same audience, not even the same price point — but the same four words, somewhere in the headline: limited time only. A creative-text search across Adbeat’s index for the phrase “limited time” turns up this pattern at scale. Capital One uses...
Most brand spotlights on this blog track advertisers that spend consistently, test dozens of creative variations, and iterate on landing pages every few weeks. Old El Paso’s summer 2026 flight is the opposite of that story, and that’s exactly why it’s worth studying. In the 90 days between May 20 and August 17, 2026, Old El Paso put an estimated $36.2 million in US ad spend behind a campaign that ran almost entirely on YouTube — and almost entirely...
Fanatical, a PC game key retailer, spent an estimated $102 million on display advertising over the last twelve months across the markets Adbeat tracks. It did that with 254 creatives — but the top-spending one, a 320×100 banner, carries five words of copy: the brand name, “SAVE BIG,” and “SHOP NOW.” That single unit absorbed an estimated $15.9 million. Meanwhile, Adobe ran 2,117 separate creatives containing the words “learn more,” and American Express ran 1,478. Between them, they put...
Auto insurance is one of the most fought-over advertising categories in the US. It’s a roughly $350 billion-a-year industry in direct written premiums, and because coverage is legally required in nearly every state, the competition isn’t about creating demand — it’s about being the name a shopper remembers the moment they start comparing quotes. That dynamic has turned GEICO, Progressive, State Farm, Allstate, and Liberty Mutual into some of the most consistent advertisers in the country, year after year,...
Red Bull doesn’t advertise the way most beverage companies do. It doesn’t run coupon campaigns, loyalty offers, or grocery circulars. It runs video at a scale that would make a Hollywood studio envious — and it uses display advertising not to push promotions, but to pull audiences into an ongoing stream of events, seasonal product launches, and branded entertainment. Over the past year, Adbeat tracked Red Bull generating an estimated 4.2 billion impressions across display and video channels —...
When I think of credit cards, I immediately think of American Express (AmEx)–particularly their platinum cards. Chances are that a lot of you do, too. That’s how popular this brand is in the payment cards industry. With a vision of providing the world’s best customer experience every day, AmEx has been issuing cards since the mid 1900s. People tout their customer service and rewards programs. But a big part of the reason this brand grew to have more than...
As an advertiser, it’s never been harder for you to capture and retain your audience’s attention. Research from the University of California, Irvine and Microsoft reveals that back in 2004, people spent an average of 2.5 minutes looking at any given screen before heading elsewhere. Today, this figure has dropped to just 47 seconds. All of which means that if you’re going to engage potential customers and compel them to take action, you’d better grab their attention fast. How...
Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are make or break for retailers, with over 200 million consumers shopping in-store and online across the 2023 Thanksgiving weekend. Per Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday remains the biggest online shopping day of all time, with total sales climbing 7.8 percent to $38 billion last year — including peak sales of $15.7 million per minute between 10:00 – 11:00 pm Eastern. With so much on the line, it makes sense to start planning your...
Walk outside your home, and you’re bound to see ads everywhere. On billboards, posters, buses, and even subway platforms. You’ve probably bought something after seeing these ads (as have millions of other people). The reason? These ads are effective. They tug at your heartstrings, make you miss something you never had, or convince you that your life will be better once you sign up for that gym membership. But how do brands know these ads will work? By testing...
The pop of the bottle opening. The gentle glug-glug-fizz as you decant the golden liquid. The foamy head; the condensation on the glass. You just can’t beat a frosty beer on a hot summer’s day. Beer-related searches on Google spike during the hottest months of the year… …and with International Beer Day still in our recent memory (who knew?), we decided to use Adbeat’s competitive intelligence data to analyze the display ad strategies of three of America’s biggest beer...
