Foreplay is a comprehensive creative workflow platform designed to revolutionize how franchise brands conduct competitive intelligence and develop high-performing advertising campaigns. Founded in 2021 by Zachary Murray after experiencing the frustrations of disorganized ad research while running his eCommerce brand Nomadic Fabrics, Foreplay has grown to serve over 30,000 users including major brands like Lululemon and Paramount Pictures.
The platform solves a critical problem that franchise marketers face daily: staying on top of competitor advertising strategies across multiple social platforms while maintaining an organized system for creative inspiration. With access to over 100 million ads in the world's largest community-curated ad library (growing by 100,000 ads weekly), Foreplay transforms chaotic screenshots and broken links into a systematic competitive intelligence engine. The platform combines four core products—Swipe File, Discovery, Spyder, and AI-powered Brief Builder—to create an end-to-end workflow from competitive research to actionable creative briefs. For franchise systems, this means corporate marketing teams and individual franchisees can monitor competitor activity, identify winning creative patterns, and develop differentiated campaigns that drive results.
Franchisors - Foreplay is ideal for franchisor corporate marketing teams managing brand positioning across competitive markets. The platform enables centralized competitive monitoring while providing franchisees with insights into local competitor advertising strategies. Multi-location franchise brands particularly benefit from Foreplay's ability to track both national competitors and regional variations in messaging.
Local Businesses - Individual franchise locations can use Foreplay to monitor local competitors' advertising strategies, adapting corporate campaigns to address market-specific competitive threats while maintaining brand consistency.
All Franchise Sizes - The tool scales effectively from emerging franchise brands (1-20 units) needing to establish market positioning to enterprise franchises (150+ units) requiring sophisticated competitive intelligence across multiple territories. The pricing structure ($49-$99/month per user) makes it accessible for smaller systems while enterprise features support large-scale deployment.
Foreplay delivers measurable ROI for franchise marketing teams by transforming reactive competitive analysis into proactive strategic advantage. Franchisors report 10-15% efficiency improvements in creative workflow, translating to faster campaign launches and reduced testing costs. By identifying competitor campaigns that are "longest-running" (a key performance indicator), brands avoid wasting budget on concepts that have already been proven ineffective in the market.
The platform's most significant impact comes from democratizing competitive intelligence across franchise systems. Instead of competitive insights residing only with corporate marketing teams, Foreplay enables franchisees to monitor local competitors and adapt strategies to their specific markets. This creates a feedback loop where regional insights inform corporate strategy while corporate learnings scale to locations.
According to user reviews on G2, brands save 5-10 hours weekly on competitive research previously spent on manual screenshot capture, broken Ad Library links, and disorganized Google Drives. The permanent ad storage means teams build institutional knowledge over time, with historical data showing seasonal patterns, creative cycles, and competitive positioning shifts. For franchise development teams, Foreplay provides FDD documentation of competitive landscape and helps new franchisees understand market dynamics faster during onboarding.
Marketing Agency Review (SourceForge):"Foreplay is the tool we chose to use to research Facebook Ads made by our competitors, we tried them all but this one is the best in my opinion. Lots of ads in the platform, really cool AI features, spy on competitors best performing ads, there's a feature called Spyder which lets you spy on competitors ads. Before Foreplay, we were saving ads in random folders, Slack threads, screenshots on our phones. Now everything's in one place, organized, and actually useful. We built swipe folders for each product launch, so whenever it's time to brainstorm, we're not starting from zero. It just makes the whole creative process smoother."
What I like best about Foreplay is how it turns chaotic ad inspiration into an organized, collaborative system. The Chrome extension makes it effortless to save ads from Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, and the ability to tag, comment, and organize creatives into boards saves a ton of time
CEO / SEO Digital Marketing Consultant
We're a small ecom team of three, so time and clarity matter. Before Foreplay, we were saving ads in random folders, Slack threads, screenshots on our phones. Now everything's in one place, organized, and actually useful.
Ecommerce Team
Foreplay represents a paradigm shift in how franchise brands approach competitive intelligence—moving from sporadic, manual research to systematic, AI-powered competitive advantage. For franchisors, the platform addresses two critical needs: maintaining corporate-level competitive awareness while empowering franchisees with location-specific insights.
What sets Foreplay apart in the franchise context is its unique combination of scale and accessibility. The 500,000+ ad library provides macro-level industry trends, while Spyder's automatic tracking enables micro-level monitoring of local competitors. This dual capability is particularly valuable for franchise systems operating across diverse markets where competitive dynamics vary significantly by region.
The platform's $49-$99/month per-user pricing (with annual discounts) makes it accessible even for emerging franchise brands, while enterprise features like unlimited API access, team collaboration tools, and white-label share boards support sophisticated deployment at scale. The fact that Lens analytics doesn't charge based on ad spend is a significant advantage over competitors, especially for franchise systems with varying ad budgets across locations.
For franchise marketers overwhelmed by the pace of digital advertising evolution, Foreplay offers a practical solution that turns competitive monitoring from a monthly burden into a daily habit embedded in team workflow. As franchise development consultant perspectives suggest, "competitive intelligence improves every aspect of franchise development"—from territory planning to franchisee recruitment to training programs. Foreplay operationalizes this intelligence in a way that's systematic, scalable, and actionable.
AI-Powered Automation and Data-Driven Discovery Process for High-Growth Franchise Brands
