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Operations · Tools

Last Updated: August 11, 2026

Creative Reader

The Creative Reader watches and listens to an ad, then writes up what it says and shows. Point it at a client's account and it reads each ad, the video, the end card, the interactive unit, and produces a structured read of the hook, the angle, the offer, the awareness stage, and more. This page covers what it is and how it works. The judgment it uses lives on a separate page, the Reader Guide, which the team edits to make the reads better.

What it is

Most tools that claim to analyze creative are really guessing from the file name or the campaign name. The Creative Reader doesn't guess. It downloads the actual ad, samples the video frame by frame, listens to the audio, and for interactive and end card units it opens them the way a phone would and looks at them. Then it reads what's genuinely there.

You get one clean record per ad, saved against the client, that any other Tierra tool can pull from: an audit, a performance note, and in time the client portal.

What it produces for each ad

For every ad, it fills in a set of fields, and they come in two kinds. The difference is the whole reason the Reader Guide exists.

Some are plain facts, where there's one right answer: the spoken-word transcript, the text on screen, whether there's an offer and what it says, the call to action, the products shown.

The rest are judgment calls, where a smart reader could reasonably differ: the hook, the persuasion angle, the creative style, who the ad is aimed at, and the awareness stage it targets. That second kind is where the tool gets better or worse, and it's exactly what the guide shapes.

How it works

You don't run the Creative Reader by hand. It runs on Tierra's servers and other tools call it. To read one ad it:

  1. Downloads the ad and pulls a frame roughly every second, ending on the last frame.
  2. For a video, pulls the audio and transcribes it.
  3. For an interactive or end card unit, opens it like a phone would and screenshots it as it loads and after a tap.
  4. Sends all of that to an AI vision read that describes only what it can see and hear, and fills in the fields above.
  5. Saves one record per ad, per client, per platform. Reading the same ad again updates that record instead of making a duplicate.

Because it works from the real asset, a read is evidence, not a guess. When it genuinely can't tell something, it's built to say so rather than invent it.

How much of an account it reads

It depends on the job. For an audit, it reads the top ads that make up about 80% of spend, enough to understand what's driving the account without wading through the long tail of tiny-spend ads. For a managed client, the goal is 100% of the creative, so we hold a complete picture of everything running.

How the team makes it better

Every judgment call the reader makes, the awareness stage, the hook, what counts as an offer, what counts as a claim, is shaped by one document: the Reader Guide. The guide is the reader's instructions. It defines each judgment field and gives the reader the categories to choose from.

The reader reads that guide fresh every time it runs, so when the guide improves, the reads improve, with no developer and no waiting on a release.

To improve a read, find the field that keeps coming back weak, open the Reader Guide, and sharpen that field's section: tighten the definition, and where it helps, add the categories or the distinction the reader keeps missing. Propose the change in #wiki-feedback on Slack the same way you would any wiki edit. Keep edits tight, because every word in the guide is read on every single ad, so length has a real cost.

Edit the guide, not the field list

The team shapes the definitions in the Reader Guide. The underlying list of fields the reader fills in is fixed in the tool itself, so changing that is a developer task. Raise it rather than trying to edit it here.

Where you'll see it

Today the Creative Reader powers the creative analysis in the audit tool. Over time the same reads will feed client performance notes and a creative section in the client portal, all drawing from the one shared record per ad.