The challenge
Maison Orion's performance team had a familiar problem. Every Monday, four media buyers spent the better part of a day pulling Meta Ad Library exports, screen-grabbing TikTok creator partnerships and stitching together a deck for the CMO. The work was tedious, never quite complete, and the moment it was shared on Slack it was already out of date.
"We were doing competitive research the way a junior analyst would do it in 2019," says Claire Lévêque, Head of Performance. "Nothing was wrong with the tools individually. They just didn't add up to a workflow."
"We replaced three subscriptions and a freelance researcher with one weekly Competition dashboard. It paid for itself in eight days."
What we set up
The Maison Orion workspace went live in two weeks. The team picked fourteen competitor brands across fragrance, skincare and selective beauty, then defined a custom taxonomy with seven product families and four campaign archetypes.
- One dashboard per market — France, Germany and the United Kingdom, all sharing the same taxonomy.
- Estimated spend calibrated against three internal reference periods, with a 0.9 platform multiplier on Meta and 1.1 on YouTube.
- Weekly Competition dashboard emailed every Monday at 7am to the CMO, the heads of brand and the four media buyers.
What changed in practice
Within the first month, the Monday-morning ritual disappeared. The team still spent time on competitive analysis — but on interpretation, not collection. Briefs that used to require two weeks of back-and-forth were closed in forty-seven minutes on average. The freelance researcher's contract was not renewed; the budget went into creative testing instead.
The numbers
Over the first quarter of use:
- -42% time spent on competitive research across the four media buyers.
- -€11k / month saved from cancelled subscriptions and the freelance contract.
- +3.1 points of Share of Ads Voice gained in France on Meta, attributable in part to faster reaction time on competitor launches.
What's next
The Maison Orion team is now piloting Partnership Ads tracking on Meta, with the goal of valuing creator collaborations in the same way they value paid placements. They're also extending the workspace to two new countries in Asia.
"The thing we underestimated," Claire concludes, "is how much faster you can argue with the CMO when you both look at the same chart."