AdForum launches Ask Maud, an AI research assistant for ad intelligence

AdForum has launched Ask Maud, an AI-powered research assistant built on its advertising archive of more than 250,000 campaigns and 25 years of curated data. The tool is designed to help agencies, brands and strategists search for precedents, benchmark competitors and find evidence-based creative insights. Why it matters: - Ask Maud gives agencies and brands a faster way to search a long-running, credited advertising archive instead of using generic AI tools. - The launch targets research, planning and creative development in an industry where source-backed examples and historical context matter. - AdForum is positioning the product as a way to combine AI speed with archive reliability. What happened: - AdForum announced Ask Maud, an AI-powered research assistant for agencies, brands, consultants and strategists. - The platform is available now. - AdForum says users can visit more information to book a demonstration. The details: - Ask Maud is built on AdForum’s database of more than 250,000 campaigns, 50,000 agencies and 25 years of curated industry data. - The assistant lets users use natural language to explore advertising trends, benchmark competitors, identify creative strategies and uncover campaign precedents. - Responses are grounded in AdForum’s archive and link back to source material. - Source material includes campaign case studies, agency credits, award recognition and historical context. - The system can answer questions such as which challenger brands disrupted a category, how brands communicated sustainability to Gen Z and what creative approaches are winning in automotive marketing. - Answers are supported by campaigns, agencies, dates, markets and case studies. - For agencies, the tool is meant to speed up new business research, strategic planning and creative development. - For brands, the platform is designed to help evaluate agency performance, analyze competitive activity and identify successful work across categories and markets. - AdForum’s editorial team has spent more than two decades cataloguing and organizing advertising work from around the world. - The archive spans more than 100 global and regional award shows. - Each campaign is linked to the agencies, creatives, directors and production companies behind it. - AdForum says that transparency and attribution are often missing from AI-generated research. - CEO Philippe Paget said the company’s biggest asset is the knowledge embedded in the archive, not just the archive itself. - Paget said Ask Maud lets users have a conversation with 25 years of advertising intelligence. - AdForum says Ask Maud combines the speed and flexibility of AI with the reliability of a professionally curated advertising archive. Between the lines: - The launch reflects a broader shift toward specialized AI tools built on proprietary data rather than open-ended chatbots. - AdForum is betting that the advertising industry will pay for answers tied to credited examples, not just generated summaries. - The company is also using its archive depth as a differentiator against general-purpose AI systems that know little about advertising. What’s next: - AdForum is inviting users to test the product through demos and direct access on askmaud.com. - The company is likely to use Ask Maud to deepen its role as a research and intelligence layer for agencies and brands. - Adoption will show whether the market values archive-based AI for day-to-day ad research and competitive analysis.