Etsy’s earnings confirmed what PolarisAI had already seen: a major pullback in marketing investment. By analyzing competitive signals before quarterly results were released, PolarisAI projected a 38% decline in spend while the market was still reacting to the underlying changes. The result highlights a growing reality for marketers: the most valuable competitive insights often emerge long before earnings calls explain them.
Most marketers trust competitive spend data without questioning where the numbers come from. We tested PolarisAI Engine™ against the only benchmark that matters: what advertisers actually reported in their earnings calls. The result was an 87% correlation across five major brands, revealing the difference between data that looks confident and data grounded in reality.
Insurance products may look the same, but advertising performance doesn’t. In this edition of the Polaris Playbook, we analyze how Progressive, GEICO, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, and Nationwide allocate social ad spend — and uncover why Progressive’s CPM is more than 50% lower than competitors despite being the category’s biggest spender. The data reveals a broader competitive advantage hidden inside the auction itself.
In this breakdown, we use PolarisAI to compare American Express and PayPal, uncovering how PayPal achieved comparable performance with dramatically lower spend through smarter targeting, simpler messaging, and more efficient execution.
The Trade Desk’s OpenTTD highlights a shift in ad tech as advertising platforms evolve into larger ecosystems. While this consolidation simplifies media buying workflows, it can also create a blind spot, limiting visibility into the broader competitive landscape shaping programmatic advertising.
