When marketing teams seek fresh ad inspiration, they often struggle with disorganized screenshots, broken links, and scattered resources. Zachary Murray tackled this challenge by creating Foreplay, a B2B platform transforming how brands discover and develop creative advertising. 

The platform now serves over 30,000 users, including Lululemon and Paramount Pictures, with what Zachary describes as “the largest curated ad library in the world,” adding 100,000 ads each week.

From Personal Challenge to Market Solution

Zachary founded Foreplay in 2021 after experiencing creative workflow challenges while running Nomadic Fabrics, a D2C brand specializing in bohemian home decor. The limitations of creative team collaboration became apparent during weekly meetings that consistently faced the same obstacle.

“We used to have a call every Friday with my entire team where everybody was supposed to bring three new pieces of ad inspiration that we could produce the next week,” Zachary recalls. “People would bring Facebook ad library links, which would be broken if the ad got taken down, or screenshots or screen recordings. And it was kind of like a messy way for everybody to bring this ad inspiration together.”

This frustration sparked an idea: “It’d be very cool if we had just a version of Pinterest that was only ads.” The concept has remained consistent since its launch and “hasn’t changed much.”

“The thing that most people know us for is still this idea of having unlimited advertising inspiration at your fingertips suggested inspiration at your fingertips,” Zachary explains. “The thing that’s mainly changed is what I think we can accomplish, but not necessarily the direction of the vision.”

The Core Product Suite

Foreplay offers a comprehensive creative workflow platform with four main products:

1. Swipe File

“Swipe File essentially allows you to save and organize ad inspiration from anywhere that you’re doing manual ad inspiration or manual creative research,” Zachary explains. 

The tool functions across “Facebook ad libraries, TikTok ad libraries, and Instagram Organic,” emphasizing mobile functionality. “I use Swipe File to save ads from Instagram while scrolling on my mobile phone,” Zachary notes. “We have a delightful process built that all you have to do is DM the ad to our company profile, which will automatically save to your account.”

The tool is a centralized repository for creative teams, eliminating the need for scattered screenshots and broken links. Users can:

• Save ads directly from social media platforms while browsing
• Organize inspiration into custom collections
• Share collections with team members
• Add notes and tags for better organization
• Access saved content across all devices

2. Discovery

As the platform’s primary feature, Discovery houses what Zachary calls “the largest curated ad library in the world.” “It’s well over 20 million ads now, growing like 100,000 ads every week,” he details. “And those aren’t randomly selected ads. Those are ads that people create.”

The platform’s sophisticated search capabilities distinguish it from other solutions:

• Filter by specific industry niches
• Search by keywords and creative targeting
• Analyze conversion tactics and messaging strategies
• Track performance metrics
• Identify trending creative approaches

“It’s a very robustly built search engine for advertising inspiration, whether it’s based on the product or the kind of conversion tactics that go into selling that product,” Zachary explains.

He recommends starting with Discovery for new users: “I would begin by just searching inside the discovery library, whether it’s keywords around your specific product or discovering your competitors for your top competitors. The usage of Discovery is starting to expand in terms of finding and saving new ad inspiration.”

3. Spyder

This automated intelligence tool “automatically scrapes all of your competitor advertising daily and extracts key insights regarding their strategy, what’s working for them, what won in their creative tests, and what might not be working,” Zachary notes. 

Implementation is straightforward: “I would add them into Spyder to start building up a database of their historical advertising.”

Spyder offers comprehensive competitor analysis features:

• Daily automated monitoring of competitor ads
• Performance tracking across platforms
• Analysis of messaging patterns and trends
• Identification of successful creative elements
• Historical data compilation and trend analysis
• Alerts for new campaign launches
• Detailed reports on competitor strategies

The tool helps brands understand what their competitors are doing and why specific approaches succeed or fail, enabling more informed creative decisions.

4. Briefs

The workflow culminates with Briefs, which Zachary describes as “just the easiest way to take all of the ad inspiration that you’re saving and then turn them into actionable briefs that you can send to whoever’s executing the asset at the next phase in the workflow.” 

The tool generates comprehensive creative briefs, including “a script, a storyboard, and all the assets that a video editor or designer might need.”

Key features of the Briefs tool include:

• Templated brief formats for consistency
• Integration with saved inspiration from Swipe File
• Collaborative editing capabilities
• Asset management system
• Version control for multiple iterations
• Direct handoff to creative teams
• Progress tracking and status updates
• Feedback collection and implementation

This streamlined approach ensures that creative teams receive clear direction and all necessary resources, reducing revision cycles and accelerating production timelines. Integrating with other Foreplay tools creates a seamless workflow from inspiration to execution, addressing a common pain point in creative development processes.

Focus on User Experience

Foreplay distinguishes itself through attention to user experience and workflow optimization. 

“We heavily obsess around product and workflow,” Zachary emphasizes. “Many software companies often build their solutions based on a feature grid. We tend to lean in the way of experience rather than a feature grid. We’re not just building features to build features. It has to fit into some sort of broader experience delightfully.”

This commitment has created significant network effects. “We have a network effect with the ad inspiration side of things that I think people, if they just use our app and any other app, will notice instantly,” Zachary notes.

Target Users and Implementation

While Foreplay serves diverse clients, success depends on execution capability rather than company size. 

“We have very large companies from Lululemon to Paramount Pictures that use us, but we also have very small brands or brands before they even start, like people just trying to figure out their content and ad strategies,” Zachary explains.

As social media targeting capabilities shift, creative strategy becomes increasingly important. 

Zachary illustrates this with an example: “If you’re selling a coffee mug, you know that coffee mug can be useful in many different ways. Making sure you have advertisements that are messaging in the direction of all of the ways that coffee mugs or whatever they are can be useful is incredibly important for tapping into the TAM on Facebook and scaling ad accounts in 2024.”

Regarding creative originality, Zachary advocates against simple replication: “At the end of the day, I don’t think that copying ads will ever 100% lead to success. It might lead to success in the short term, but it can never lead to success in the long term.”

Future Developments

Foreplay plans to expand its enterprise solutions by 2025 and develop facial identification technology for advertisements. 

“You’ll soon be able to look at a competitor’s ad account inside Foreplay and instantly see which influencers they’re working with or which UGC creators they’re working with,” Zachary shares. “And just being able to reverse engineer and create an ecosystem around discovering new talent based on other people and what they’re creating.”

Zachary maintains a balanced approach to product development: “I think there should always be some sort of product filter on your team. You take in as much product feedback as possible, but it has to go through the filter of whatever direction you’re going with the product.

“There might be a really good piece of user feedback for their specific use case, but if that doesn’t align with where you’re going in the medium to long term, then it shouldn’t be worked on because it’s taking away time and resources from the main mission and vision,” he adds.

“Every marketer saves inspiration,” Zachary concludes. “We’re helping you do that much better and then supercharging what that process is on the back end of that inspiration and what you do with that inspiration. Give it a try because I feel like pretty much anybody who uses it is like, ‘Wow, I built this for myself.’ So I think you’ll enjoy it.”