Competitor Meta Ad Insights

1. One Christmas script is doing more work than everything else combined. 51 of the 100 detailed ads (all in the durability-proxy tier) are the same “SOLD OUT in 48 hours last year” offer: a free Frankincense & Myrrh scent, bottle and cloth thrown in with any Starter Kit. Purdy & Figg has recut that single script across dozens of different creators, characters and edit lengths (0:04 to 0:53), which reads as a brand systematically testing which cast and cut of one winning idea keeps working, not as a brand short on ideas.
2. Scarcity plus a free gift beats a straight discount for their longest-running message. The Christmas ad never says “X% off.” It says the free item sold out before and you might miss it again. Every one of the 51 variants has been active the full 138-day window we could see, which is the single strongest durability signal in the whole set.
3. The everyday backbone is still a straightforward discount, though. Outside the Christmas script, 31 of the impression-verified ads are plain “Was £X, Now £Y” product-and-price statics or simple flatlay videos (avg 133.3 days live). Purdy & Figg runs urgency for the flagship seasonal moment and runs price-off for everything else.
4. Real customers and creators carry almost all the video. Outside the two scripted comedy pieces (a robed “don’t mind if I do” man and a costumed Santa), every other talking or demoing person on screen is a genuine-looking UGC creator: kitchen hacks, before-guests-arrive routines, doorstep sprays, sofa-cleaning close-ups. Production is a phone, not a studio.
5. Seasonal collection launches (Mediterranean, Summer) get a distinct, price-free introduction before the discount statics take over. The “Give your home a holiday” Mediterranean Collection ads open with an aspirational hand-and-bottle shot against a Mediterranean landscape, no price on screen, before the same collection reappears days later as a “Was £50, Now £19.99” kit static. Introduce the world, then sell the kit.
6. Gifting language appears constantly, but it is gift-with-purchase, not gift-targeting. 73 of the 100 ads use the words free or gift, almost entirely as a GWP mechanic (free scent, free bottle, free cloth with a kit you buy for yourself). We saw no ad written to a gift-giver buying this for someone else, unlike the classic “for the new mum in your life” framing seen in other gifting categories.

Days-live is capped at 138 in this capture for anything that has been running the entire window we could observe, so several types tie at the ceiling rather than showing a true maximum. The sold-out urgency video's "138d, 0 verified" combination is the one to read carefully: it is the most durable message in the account by a wide margin, but every single one of its 51 ads is a proxy pick, not a Meta impression-rank pick, precisely because there are so many of them that none individually cracked Meta's top-49 impression sort.

Source: Meta Ad Library, public UK listing for Purdy & Figg, captured 12 Aug 2026. The harvest pass collected 251 unique active ads; the harvest log's own coverage caveat estimates roughly 24,667 further active ads existed that were not retrievable because 40 search windows hit Meta's ~27-result grid cap, so this is a large sample of the active-ad universe, not a complete count. From that pool, 100 ads were fully detailed: ranks 1-49 sorted by Meta's own total_impressions field (the genuine top-ads signal Meta exposes), ranks 50-100 selected by days-live from the 251-ad pool as a durability proxy because Meta's impression sort itself caps at roughly 27 results per query. All 100 were classified by primary creative type from their actual copy, image or video poster frame; offer and gifting flags were read from the ad's captured copy text. Days-live and creative longevity are used as a durability proxy because Meta does not publish spend or true impression figures for commercial ads; an ad that keeps running is a reasonable, but not certain, signal that it is not losing money. No customer quotes, reviews or claims beyond what is visible in Purdy & Figg's own public ad copy are used anywhere in this report.