How about a Swiss Army Ad Scraper?
It creates varying profiles on all the social networks and then scrapes ad content, destination URLs and copies the first page of the destination URL into a file.
Or with a keyword input, it integrates with the google KW suggestion tool, then takes all the suggested keywords out of that, then scrapes the ad text, destination URLs and landing pages out of each of the major SERPS.
Give it a scraping schedule so it knows to go recheck it's results every X minutes. You plug in what you're looking for, set it and forget it.
You come back 24 hours or a week or a month later and right there on your hard drive (or your server?) you have everything the competition is doing, without even having to surf the web.
Display would be one ad and the landing page (even better if it could do both a quick preview image and a copy of the actual page with functional links etc.) with a <next> button. I want to know who is advertising for Pedipaws, I just plug in the keyword. When I come back I have copies of 5,000 ads, an image preview of the page (so I can see if it sucks balls) and a working copy (so I can "borrow" it) if I like it.
Yeah. I wouldn't mind having that.
edit: Oh, other things that occured to me.
for myspace and fb, it would also copy the ad images, for a quick peek. Have the demographic profile on display for each ad (so if my "person" is a 28 year old female who is in to Oragami all that shows on the same page with the scraped ad and the preview of the landing page).
It would also need to monitor for changes to landing pages. Maybe just compare the first 100-200 characters of the html to see if anything's changed since the last visit?)
Not sure how to avoid being a dick and actually "clicking" the ads. Definitely don't want that. I wouldn't want to be paying for my own scraper checking out my own ads or costing the competition money (they might do unto me also
).
Maybe have a "do not call" list of URLs/ads that haven't changed at all. Not sure how to do that. Something like a reverse captcha maybe? if pixel x32, y57 is #00FF00 and x57, y144 is #3C3F00 then don't go looking again cuz nothing in the ad has changed...)
Urgh, brainstorm hell.
I need a beer.
Great post Bo.