Four companies swap the county and run the same line again. The oldest version has been live 242 days. Here is why it keeps working, and what a franchise unit is allowed to copy.
You write a new ad every month. Four companies in your trade have run the same sentence for eight months.
We count every bath company advertising on Meta in America every week. On 14 September 2026 that was 216 companies running 4,389 live ads. We also group the opening lines, so a line that runs in forty towns counts as one line.
The biggest group is this one.
"We're looking for 150 homeowners in JEFFERSON COUNTY for a 1-DAY Tub or Shower update."
Swap the county. Run it again.
125 versions. 159 live ads. Four companies. The oldest has been up 242 days.
A second group runs the same shape in 16 more counties, 222 days old.
It does three things at once, and each is doing work.
It names her county, so it reads like news and not like an ad. It puts a number on the offer, so it sounds finite. And it asks her to be one of a group, not a customer.
17 companies in the trade run some form of "looking for N homeowners". Between them, 422 live ads.
You do not have to like it. It has been running for eight months against people who kill ads in four days.
One Florida company runs eleven near-identical ads. Each is a phone video of the crew on a job. The only change is the words on the first frame.
Taylor County. Wakulla County. Calhoun County. Levy County. Hamilton County. Jefferson County. Walton County. Gilchrist County.
Every one of the eleven has been live between 87 and 89 days. That company swaps most of its creative every twelve days.
The crew footage is the same. The county is the ad.
Half the trade runs under a franchise system, and it shows in the volume.
| This week | Pages | Live ads | Median per page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under a franchise system | 111 | 1,016 | 6 |
| Not a franchise | 113 | 3,373 | 18 |
Base: 224 pages, 216 companies, week of 14 September 2026.
Almost the same number of pages. Three times the ads on one side.
The biggest system runs 84 pages and 560 ads between them. Its busiest location runs 18. On the other side of the table, one independent runs 350.
That gap is not size. Most of these units are real companies doing real volume. It is what the package ships with, and how much of it a unit may change.
If you are independent, your advantage is that you can say the county out loud and they often cannot.
If you run a unit, ask your next system call one specific question. Who makes the version with my county on it?
The trick is not the sentence. It is that somebody made one idea 125 times.
We group lines after stripping case, punctuation and emoji. Two lines that differ by a comma count as one. Nothing here is spend or results, and a line that runs long is not proof of a sold job.
What it is proof of is a choice. Somebody renewed that sentence 125 times.
Take the ad that worked best for you last quarter. Count how many versions of it you ran.
If the answer is one, you have a winner you never used.
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