The live Meta ads of 11 watch brands, ranked by the people each one reaches per day, and the benchmarks those brands set: 2.3 new ads a week, 8 landing pages, 28% video.
Nobody hand-picked the ads on this page. They are the live Meta ads of leading watch brands, ranked by daily reach, which is the number of people an ad has reached divided by the days it has been running, taken from the delivery data Meta publishes for ads shown in the UK. The ads at the top are the ones reaching the most people today, and when a brand scales a winner or retires a loser, the order moves with it.
The benchmarks above are tracked beside The Wilow Ad Index, which measures 11 watch brands the same way as every industry it covers and keeps them out of its all-industries figures.
The ads below are live, in the order of the people each one reaches per day. Click any ad to open the brand’s complete live ad library, where you can watch the creative, read the copy and see the landing page it sends people to.
Watch brands advertise on Meta very differently from the rest of the Ad Index. Across the 11 watch brands with enough live ads to measure, the typical brand starts 2.3 new ads a week, against 4.1 for the median brand across the rest of the Ad Index. It sends people to 8 different landing pages, against 6. And 28% of its live ads are video, against 47%. Watch brands launch less, send people to more pages, and use less video.
The clearest split in this set is between brands that keep ads running and brands that keep launching new ones. Maen, tracked here, has 40 live ads, and 36 of them have been running for 90 days or more, while it starts fewer than one new ad a week. Laco, tracked here, started no new ads in the last 30 days, and all 6 of its live ads are past 90 days.
Nivada Grenchen, tracked here, runs the opposite way. It starts 6.5 new ads a week, and none of its 28 live ads has reached 90 days. Farer, tracked here, sits between the two: 4.9 new ads a week, with 15 of its 36 live ads past 90 days.
Neither approach is wrong on its own. A long-running ad is one a brand has chosen to keep paying for. Across the 11 brands, 73% have at least one live ad past 90 days, against 58% across the rest of the Ad Index. If you are building a watch account, the question to ask is which of your ads have earned the right to keep running, and whether you are giving new ideas enough time to prove themselves before you replace them.
Video is a minority format here. The median watch brand runs 28% video, and the middle half of brands sit between 15.5% and 48.5%. Nivada Grenchen and Laco, both tracked here, have no video among their live ads at all, and Maen, tracked here, has 5%.
A few brands go the other way. Certina, tracked here, runs 67% video, Baltic, tracked here, runs 64%, and Formex, tracked here, runs 50%. When you study the video ads on this page, look at what the motion adds that a photograph of the dial could not: the movement of the hands, the watch on a wrist, the light moving across the case.
The median watch brand points its live ads at 8 different landing pages. Maen, tracked here, uses 18 across its 40 live ads, while Hamilton, tracked here, uses 2 across its 11. When you click through the ads on this leaderboard, check whether the page you land on shows the exact watch the ad showed you.
Only 1 of the 11 watch brands uses paid creator partnerships. Formex, tracked here, runs 1 of its 10 live ads with a creator. Across the rest of the Ad Index, 19% of brands use paid creators. Watches are a category where most brands still speak in their own voice on Meta, which leaves the creator format largely open.