Foreplay is an all-in-one ad creative workflow platform that helps marketers streamline their creative research, discovery, and production across social media platforms. Key features include a Swipe File for saving and organizing ads, a Discovery database of 10M+ ads, and Spyder for competitor ad tracking. The platform also offers AI-powered creative briefs, a mobile app, and a free music library.
Foreplay is one of the best and most popular ad creative workflow tools in the ecommerce ecosystem. Thousands of brands (mainly marketing teams) leverage the tool to discover new winning ads, keep track of their competitors and build creative briefs.
Below, we are going to explore some of the top features that Foreplay offers and go deep into what you can do with them, how they can help improve your brands’ performance and more. We'll also touch on a few of Foreplay's newest product features, like their AI-powered ad brief generator, and how you can build it into your marketing team’s workflow.
Then we'll compare Foreplay's pricing model to a few other tools in the category and give you our overall recommendation. Let's get started.
Foreplay is an all-in-one ad creative workflow platform that helps growth marketers and D2C brands streamline their ad creative research, discovery and production. Foreplay is essentially a centralized hub for saving, organizing, and collaborating on ads from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
The tool also has features for competitor research (more on this later), AI-generated briefs and more. Some of Foreplay's key product features include:
Swipe File - You can easily save ads from platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram with a single click (via the Chrome Extension). This helps you build “Swipe Files” of creative inspiration for your entire team.
Spyder Ad Spy - You can track every ad your competitors launch and get real-time alerts. This can help you analyze competitor creative strategies to ultimately find new angles and ideas for your own ads.
Discovery Library - Foreplay’s ad library has over 10 million ads from 200,000+ brands. They offer advanced AI search and filtering to easily navigate and discover exactly what you are looking for out there.
AI-Powered Briefs & Storyboards - Once you discover a new ad or create a Swipe File, you can then leverage their AI to build briefs and storyboards.
One of the most used features in Foreplay is the Swipe File. The Swipe File is powered by their Chrome Extension, which takes about 30 seconds to set up. Once you install it to your Chrome, you can save ads directly to Foreplay from anywhere - Facebook Ad Library, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and more. It basically eliminates the need to ever screenshot an ad or copy a link to send to a teammate again.
The Swipe File dashboard is very clean and easy to navigate. You can organize all of your Files and different folders however you’d like. You can create different boards for static ads, GIFs, creator videos, testimonials, or whatever makes sense for your workflow. The organization system is super flexible and lets you tag/filter by brand, platform, language, ad status and even specific niche.
We also like how Foreplay makes competitor creative research super easy. You can pin specific brands you want to keep tabs on right in your Swipe File dashboard. If your brand uses a handful of brands to get inspiration from or even just keep tabs on what they’re producing creative wise, then you can favorite them right in your Swipe File dashboard and easily keep eyes on all of their ads right when they launch. You can then toggle into the brand profile and see all of the ads that you’ve saved from that brand over time.
Foreplay also makes sharing and team collaboration simple too. If you're an agency, you can send clients a clean, shareable link to view the swipe file you've built for their campaign approval or just general creative guidance. If you’re a brand, you can organize different boards and folders based on creative styles, formats, or platforms.
We’d think a lot of brands would want to organize things based on upcoming campaigns too - so if you have an upcoming Holiday sale or similar, you can create a Swipe File for it, use the platform to discover relevant creative inspiration and then share your File with your designer/creative team to get working on it.
It’s also worth noting that every ad preserves all content (creative, ad copy and CTA), even if the ad is turned off in their ad account. Foreplay also automatically captures screenshots of the ad's landing pages (both desktop and mobile) so you get the full picture of the creative funnel. It’s not specifically built to be a landing page research tool, but you could definitely spin it into one if you wanted to analyze how brands are pairing their creative and landing page strategies together.
Another core feature in Foreplay is their Discovery component. You can think of it like an easily-filtered, permanently available version of the Facebook Ad Library. It has over 25,000,000 ads in total saved to it and is constantly being grown.
The Discovery UX is powered by incredibly robust filtering features. You can drill down your search based on creative format (like images, videos, carousels), by platform (Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn), ad status (even off), niche (like home goods, supplements, SaaS, etc), content style and even target demographic.
So if you wanted to find Facebook static ads from supplement brands that target women over 65+, then you could easily set up those filters in the Discovery interface to show you exactly that. It’s 100x faster than trying to gather up different brand names, searching for them in the Facebook Ad Library, saving their ad URLs in a Google Sheet and then sharing it with your team.
Another feature to keep in mind is Foreplay’s brand search functionality. You can search for any brand and instantly see pretty much all of their ads - whether they are on or were turned off. The ability to search by brand, especially if you have a handful that you look to for inspiration, can save you a lot of time and help you do better work.
Foreplay also partners with creative experts from tons of different niches and brands. These experts can save and organize their own boards right in the platform (see image below). You can click into their profiles, check out their curated Swipe Files, and see exactly what creative stands out in the eye of top-tier creative strategists. You’ll notice a lot of these experts organize their saves based on specific elements like hooks, creative styles, or personalization approaches.
The last thing to mention in regards to the Discovery tool is how efficiently it fits into the overall Foreplay platform. You can save any ad you find directly to your own boards or swipe files right from the Discovery UX. You don’t have to jump back and forth between different sections of the platform just to save ads and organize them into Swipe Files - it is all done in the same UX. It’s a small, but consequential feature!
Spyder is Foreplay's competitor ad tracking tool that automatically saves and analyzes every ad your competitors launch. You can think of it like having a full-time creative researcher working for you 24/7 to watch your competition and get insights from the media that they launch. You can also set it up so that it watches how the ad statuses change over time (what was turned on, off, etc).
When you set up Spyder, you can just put in the brands you want to track and then it will automatically start scraping and saving each ad they launch. Once you add a brand you want to watch into Spyder, you can navigate into their profile for some pretty slick insights:
Something else we need to call out is how you can navigate over to “Landing Pages” in Spyder and go down the list of landing pages and check them all out via screenshots that Foreplay shows you. It’s a wild feature in our opinion. You can toggle between desktop and mobile too. Like it does in the main dashboard, it will show you exactly how many live ads point to that landing page too, which can help you back into which one is the best performing.
Foreplay doesn’t give you many metrics behind the ads or the landing pages (perhaps because it’s not readily accessible data) but we think down the road they’ll find a way to connect web traffic to the landing pages. Then if they can estimate a CPC, they’ll be able to back into an estimate on spend and volume going to that landing page.
Another key aspect of Spyder is how it organizes competitor creative tests. It can bundle together ads that were launched on the same day, making it super easy to see what variations brands are testing against each other. You can quickly identify which ads are still running (meaning they likely won) and which ones got turned off (meaning they likely lost).
You can also export competitor creative tests to CSV files, share specific campaign research or ads via links, or set up automated email reports to your entire marketing team.
Overall, some of the key features that we think are unique and powerful in Spyder include:
The last feature we’ll discuss is Foreplay’s AI-Powered Creative Brief workflow tool. It doesn’t seem like their most popular feature, as a lot of creative strategists or marketers have different workflows or use external tools to aid in their creative production, but it can be a powerful tool if you use it.
Foreplay's AI Briefs help you transform your ad inspiration into actionable briefs and storyboards that you can then take to your ad producer (i.e. content creators) or designer. To create a brief, you’ll first want to make sure that the brand profile you create is selected (includes things like fonts, brand colors, music genres, guidelines, etc). Then you’ll be able to fill in more information and inspiration to build the brief, including:
We’d think most marketers use the storyboard feature for video production. You’ll likely don’t need all of the features for static production - you can probably just lean leveraging Swipe Files for those. But for videos, the AI Brief Tool, if used properly, can drastically cut down on brief production time and likely improve the quality of your creative briefs.
One thing to note is that Foreplay doesn't try to replace human creativity with AI - instead, they make it clear that the AI Brief tool is focused on eliminating the tedious parts of brief creation so marketers can spend more time on strategy and ideation (the things marketers are best at anyways).
Mobile App - Foreplay's mobile app lets you save creative inspiration wherever you find it. You can quickly save ads from social media using the share function, snap photos of offline ads, and even browse through Foreplay's library of over 1,000,000 ads right from your phone. Everything syncs seamlessly with your desktop Swipe Files, and you can tag and organize content on the go.
Chrome Extension - As mentioned earlier, Foreplay's Chrome Extension is what powers a lot of their core functionality. The extension lets you save ads from Facebook Ad Library, TikTok Creative Center, LinkedIn, and Instagram with just one click. When you save an ad, it automatically captures all the important details - the creative, ad copy, landing pages, and metadata - and syncs everything to your Foreplay account where you can organize it into boards, add tags, and share with your team.
AdTrax - Foreplay offers a completely free music library called AdTrax that's specifically built for paid social ads and micro-content. Each track comes in multiple lengths (5, 15, and 30 seconds) and includes three distinct layers - a music bed for mood, sound design elements for pacing, and branded elements like logo stingers. Great library to use if you want to avoid licensing issues.
Experts - Foreplay partners with dozens of top creative strategists and media buyers who share their curated swipe files directly in the platform. When you're browsing ads in Discovery or building briefs, you can easily access these expert-curated collections to see what catches their eye and how they organize different creative concepts. Each expert typically organizes their saves based on specific elements like hooks, creative styles, or performance metrics.
Let's talk about Foreplay's pricing model and what you actually get at each tier. Foreplay offers two main plans designed to fit different stages of your creative workflow:
Inspiration Plan ($49/month)
This plan includes everything you need to discover, save and share ads from across platforms. You get access to Foreplay's growing library of over 500,000 ads, unlimited saves, the Chrome extension, mobile app, and the ability to track 2 competitor brands in Spyder. It's perfect for smaller teams or those just getting started with organized creative research.
Full Workflow Plan ($99/month)
This includes everything in Inspiration plus all of Foreplay's AI-powered creative tools. You get AI script writing, storyboard generation, custom templates, brand profiles, and more. This plan comes with 2 user seats (vs 1 in Inspiration) and is best for teams that want to maximize the platform.
It’s $20/month per user if you wanted to add more users to either plan. For either plan, there's no limit on how many ads you can save or boards you can create. When you consider how much time Foreplay saves in creative research and brief creation - tasks that typically eat up hours of your week - the monthly cost becomes pretty minimal.
It’s a bit tricky to compare Foreplay to other tools in the market as there aren’t many that are direct comparisons with comparable product features. But in general, Foreplay’s pricing seems pretty fair and cheap for what you get.
Foreplay offers a 7-day free trial, so you can test out all the features and see how they fit into your workflow before paying for a subscription.
You can view Foreplay's full pricing breakdown here.
Of course, the best way to see if Foreplay is the right fit for your team/needs is to try it for yourself. Foreplay offers everyone a 7-day free trial and you don’t need to enter a credit card. Getting started is quick - you can install the Chrome extension, start saving your first ads, and organize a swipe file in just a few minutes.
Here are a few helpful links:
If you decide to move forward with Foreplay, they offer an annual plan that gives you 2 months free compared to monthly pricing. You can also use 1-800-D2C’s Friends Rate for 50% OFF your first three months - just message them or message us here and let them know you came through us to get the discount.
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