Half of UK brands are advertising on Meta without a single proven winner

A durable ad is the clearest signal of one that works. Brands switch off creative that does not perform, so an ad still running after 90 days has earned its place. By that measure, most UK brands have never found one.

That is the headline from the first edition of the Wilow Ad Index, a new benchmark that reads the live Meta ads of UK brands through Meta's public Ad Library. Across 5,460 active ads from 91 brands, 44 of them had not a single ad older than 90 days. For the typical brand, only around 2% of its ads had reached that mark.

The gap between the brands that test and the ones that guess

The brands that have found durable winners look completely different from the rest. Names like Soho Home, Kendamil and Scrumbles run accounts made up almost entirely of long-running ads, and heavy spenders such as Huel sit close behind. The pattern is not luck. These brands keep testing new creative until something sticks, then let the winner run while everyone else keeps starting over.

Video is now the default, and creators are the missing lever

Two other findings stand out. Video has quietly become the standard format, making up about half of every brand's live ads, with some fashion and services brands pushing well past three quarters. And creator partnerships, despite years of hype, remain wide open: more than half the brands in the data run none at all in their ads. The brands that do lean in, including Gymshark and a handful of challenger supplement labels, treat named creators as a real share of their advertising rather than an occasional experiment.

What it signals for UK advertising in 2026

Put together, the data describes a market where volume and testing separate the winners from the also-rans. The busiest advertisers launch around six new ads a week, not because volume wins on its own, but because it gives a breakout ad the chance to appear. On raw reach, Huel led UK delivery at 38.3 million people, ahead of Revolut and Temu.

The full breakdown, including the landing-page and reach leaderboards, is published in the Wilow Ad Index. Every figure is drawn from Meta's public Ad Library, so anyone can verify it.

Read the full research: the Wilow Ad Index.