Clay closed a $115M Series D at $7.1B on 9 September and announced $200M ARR the next day. 17,000 teams. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google on the customer list.
Their paid engine does not look like Viktor's. Fewer ads, three channels, and a Meta account that is 32 days old. I pulled every live ad on Meta, LinkedIn and Google, the landing pages, the signup flow and the pricing ladder to see how a $7B GTM company buys demand.
Same split as last time: the Creative Factory, then the Performance Machine.
Clay ads: key findings
- 56 Meta ads ever, 45 live, every one of them launched on or after 21 August 2026
- 51 of 56 Meta ads never leave Meta: the click opens an Instant Form
- 463 LinkedIn ads read from a 1,300-ad account, the channel that actually carries them
- 200 Google ads, running since January 2024
- 16 video files behind 29 video ads, cut to 10 concepts
- 36-second median video, none under 24 seconds
- 37 of 56 headlines start with "Book a demo -"
- Four European case-study ads ran 146 days each at 200,000 to 300,000 impressions
- Pricing is a slider, and the unit price drops 33% across the ladder
Part 1: The Creative Factory
One creative set, three channels
| Channel | Ads | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 463 | Single image, video, message ads, thought-leader posts | |
| 200 | Search plus YouTube, since January 2024 | |
| Meta | 56 | Demo-form ads, since 21 August 2026 |
The Meta videos and the LinkedIn videos are the same files. "Book a demo - see how RevOps builds GTM plays in Clay" runs on both with the same body copy, the same presenter, the same cut. Clay makes a creative once and puts it wherever the audience is.
On Meta the split is 29 video, 23 static, 4 dynamic. Behind the 29 video ads sit 16 files, and behind the 16 files sit 10 concepts. Each concept is cut at 9:16 and 4:5 and each cut runs as two or three ad objects.
A 32-day-old account, launched in one day
Two ads on 21 August. One on the 23rd. Then 24 ads on 1 September, in one push, and a trickle since.
This is not a machine yet. It is a launch. Clay Ads sells audience syncing to Meta, so Clay is now buying on the platform its product feeds. The account exists to prove the product.
Nothing under 24 seconds
Median video is 36 seconds. The shortest is 24. The longest, a two-speaker testimonial, is 65.
| Video length | Files |
|---|---|
| Under 30 seconds | 1 |
| 30 to 40 seconds | 11 |
| 40 to 60 seconds | 3 |
| Over 60 seconds | 1 |
Half the files are 9:16. Six are 4:5. Two old ones from January and June are 360 by 640, phone-shot and never recut. Everything since August is produced.
Talking head, then the screen, then a stat card
- A caption is on screen by one second in 12 of 16 files. Only 8 have one at 0.3 seconds. They let the presenter land first.
- Captions sit at 53% to 60% of frame height. Over the chest, not the lower third.
- Two cuts in the first six seconds, median. No file has zero. One has six.
- Every video has the same spine: presenter with a handheld mic, cut to the product, cut to a solid-colour stat card, back to the presenter.
The stat cards are the tell. Orange, blue, green, one number each: "$1.27 million", "23X", "$10 million in ad budget", "200,000". The presenter says the number and the card repeats it.
Viktor holds dead still and lets the caption do the work. Clay cuts every three seconds and lets the number do it.
Here is their most-cloned file, eight ad objects across three aspect ratios.
10 concepts, 16 files
Ordered by how many ad objects each one carries. Tap any cell to watch the ad.
The statics are an index card and a 3D logo
Two systems. An index card with a red "COOKED" stamp and three checkbox lines: "Signs your CRM is cooked", "Signs your ad targeting is cooked". And a customer logo as a 3D object on a flat colour: OpenAI on green, Anthropic on orange, Vanta on purple, "Start Free Trial" under each.
Then the livestream cards, dark magenta or dark green with a soft blob and two headshots, for the webinars with Go Nimbly, NewEdge and The Kiln. Every static ships in three ratios.
There is no photography anywhere in the static set. It is type, one object and a colour.
22 body copies. One headline shape.
37 of 56 headlines begin "Book a demo -". What follows the dash is the test: "get 70%+ match rates on your ads" on 8 ads, "see lead enrichment happen live" on 5, "see Clay's ABM playbook live" on 5, "see how Clay fixes ad targeting" on 4.
The body copy is a question and a promise. "Want to see how Clay Ads gets match rates from 20% to 70%+? Book a demo - we'll walk through how we turn your lists into precise, multi-channel ad audiences."
Same structure on every ad. Want to see X? Book a demo, we will show you X. The variable is X, and X is a product surface: Clay Ads, enrichment, ABM, scoring, RevOps workflows, agents.
That is a product-line test dressed as a creative test. Each concept is a different thing Clay sells, and the account tells them which thing cold traffic books a demo for. If you want the general version, read our guide to creative analytics or the walkthrough on turning competitor hooks into your own.
Part 2: The Performance Machine
Now the half you cannot see in the feed.
The click never leaves Meta
51 of 56 Meta ads link to fb.me. That is not a landing page. It is an Instant Form.
| Form field | |
|---|---|
| Headline | "Get a demo of how Clay helps you find and target your best customers." |
| Field 1 | Work email |
| Field 2 | Full name |
| Field 3 | Company name |
| Field 4 | Phone number |
| Thank-you | "Thanks for your interest! Our team will follow up by email shortly." |
Meta pre-fills all four from the profile. The CTA button says "Book now". Nobody visits clay.com, nobody sees a pricing page, and the conversion event fires inside the app that served the ad.
So there is no campaign taxonomy in the URL to decode, because there is no URL. The five ads that do link out are the January dynamic ads, "Start a FREE Trial Now", pointed at clay.com/clay-for-marketing and clay.com/clay-for-gtm-ops. Those are retired. The self-serve pitch on Meta lasted five days.
Two philosophies, two dates. January: free trial, click out, self-serve. August onward: demo form, stay in the app, a rep follows up. Same company, opposite funnel, and the second one is the one they scaled.
LinkedIn is the account
463 ads attributed to Clay on LinkedIn from a 1,300-ad read, against 56 on Meta and roughly 200 on Google. Put the three channels side by side and the shape of the budget is obvious: this is a LinkedIn company running a Meta experiment, not the other way around.
This is where the money is.
| LinkedIn format | Ads read |
|---|---|
| Single image | 308 |
| Video | 98 |
| Message ads | 50 |
| Carousel, document, follow, spotlight | 7 |
The message ads are templated InMail. "Hi %FIRSTNAME%, Saw you're running RevOps at %COMPANYNAME%. I've been working with RevOps teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Vanta to run enrichment and routing from a shared data layer on Clay." Swap RevOps for marketing and the logos become ElevenLabs, Anthropic and Verkada. 16 ads say the first, 11 say the second. Same message, two personas, six logos.
The single-image ads are a webinar machine. "Join the launch livestream for a first look" on 28 ads, "Join us on March 12th for a live workshop" on 20, "[LIVE Feb 11] Tailored Slide Decks at Scale" on 19. A dated event every two to three weeks, each one promoted a dozen ways.
And the ads with the most reach are not about the product at all. "Read the full case study with Mistral AI", "with Sana", "with Legora", "with Terrapinn", and "See how Clay is scaling in Europe" each ran from 6 March to 29 July, 146 days, at 100,000 to 300,000 impressions. A European expansion, bought as customer stories.
Thought-leader ads from people who do not work there
LinkedIn lets a company promote a person's post. Clay promotes 21 people. Their co-founder Varun Anand on 8 ads, Head of Growth Davide Grieco on 6, Head of Marketing Bruno Estrella on 3, then a spread of GTM engineers, product and sales development.
Six of the 21 do not work there. "Growth Marketing @Legora", a customer. The CEO of Pavilion. The CEO of Go Nimbly, an agency partner. A VP of Revenue at CertifID. A growth lead at Netic. Their posts, Clay's budget.
Their Creators programme explains it. The perks listed are "Clay Credits and LinkedIn Ad spend". Clay pays creators in the currency of promoting the creator's own post about Clay.
Nobody trusts a company page. Clay just pays to put a real person's post in front of more of the right people, instead of writing its own.
Where the Google clicks go
| Destination | What it is |
|---|---|
clay.com/ | The homepage, for brand and category search. |
makes.clay.com/data/enrichment | A separate landing subdomain. "Reps Sell, Clay Researches." |
makes.clay.com | "Why use one contact database when you can use them all?" |
200 Google ads: 59 text, 42 video, 17 image in the sample. First seen January 2024, still running. Markets are the US, Canada, UK and five EU countries. The headlines are category plus claim: "Clay | AI GTM Platform - #1 In AI Data", "Flexible, Risk-Free Pricing", "Clay Data Enrichment - Reps Sell, Clay Researches".
The makes. subdomain is a paid-only landing system, separate from the Webflow marketing site. Nothing on it links to the nav.
The PLG funnel: one screen, then five questions
The Google and self-serve traffic lands here.
"Welcome to Clay! Sign up to turn any growth idea into reality - in minutes." One screen. Then the app takes over, and the shipped bundle documents what it asks:
- "What team are you on?"
- "What CRM or database do you use?"
- "What tools do you use?"
- "How did you hear about Clay?" A free-text field. The placeholder reads "Googling 'Clay'..."
- "What's the first problem you'd like to solve with Clay?"
Question four is self-reported attribution, asked after the email. Question two is a segmentation field that also tells them which integration to show first.
Steal the placeholder. "Googling 'Clay'..." tells the reader the answer can be two words. A blank attribution box gets skipped. A pre-filled joke gets filled in.
Free is 100 credits. Then the slider.
Free gets 100 data credits and 500 actions a month. That is enough to enrich one small list, once.
Launch and Growth are not prices. They are two sliders, one for actions and one for data credits, and the price is wherever you leave them.
| Launch, actions per month | Price | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| 15,000 | $60 | $4.00 |
| 40,000 | $150 | $3.75 |
| 60,000 | $200 | $3.33 |
| 100,000 | $290 | $2.90 |
| 200,000 | $540 | $2.70 |
The unit price falls a third from the bottom rung to the top. Viktor charges $2.50 per thousand credits at every rung. Clay discounts for volume, because an action is a workflow step and the marginal cost is near zero. Data credits are the opposite: they start at $0.05 each and fall slowly, because every credit is a purchase from one of 200 vendors in their marketplace.
Annual billing is a second column on the same slider, 10% off. The trial is a countdown: the app tells you how many "days until your free trial ends", and support can extend it once.
Then the wall. "Oh no! Looks like you ran out of credits." The app offers to buy more "based on your auto top-up settings", and the payment method is a Stripe checkout it opens for you.
| Gate | What it costs you | What it gets them |
|---|---|---|
| Google sign-in | An identity | A verified work domain, before any question is asked |
| Five onboarding questions | A minute | Team, CRM, stack, attribution, use case |
| Credits exhausted | 100 credits of enrichment | Auto top-up, card on file, a slider that only goes up |
Ten things watching you land
| System | Doing what |
|---|---|
| Google Tag Manager | Standard. |
| Intellimize | Landing-page personalisation and A/B testing on three hosts. The homepage you see is not the homepage I see. |
| Intercom | Chat, 16 references on the homepage alone. |
| Rewardful | Affiliate attribution. |
| Dub | Short links and partner attribution. |
| HubSpot | Forms and the marketing CRM. |
| Klaviyo | Email. |
| Transcend | Consent management. |
| Insight tag, and the destination of half their ad budget. | |
| Webflow on Vercel | The marketing site. The app is a separate build on app.clay.com. |
Intellimize is the one that matters. A company whose product is "enrich the visitor, then personalise" runs personalisation on its own front door.
Partners get 20%, a fund, and ad spend
Three programmes. Solutions Partners, in four tiers from Artisan to Elite Studio, earn 20% revenue share on shared customers and can draw $500 to $15,000 from a growth fund for workshops, courses and tools. Integration Partners get a listing. Creators get "Clay Credits and LinkedIn Ad spend" and a Slack with 300 other creators.
| Programme | Pays in |
|---|---|
| Solutions Partners | 20% revenue share, $500 to $15,000 grants |
| Creators | Credits and LinkedIn ad spend on the creator's posts |
| Integration Partners | Distribution |
Nobody gets paid in cash for a post. Agencies get margin, creators get reach, and both go back into the product to earn it. Viktor pays creators in credits at a 50% premium to cash. Clay pays them in impressions.
What actually makes this work
Clay's Creative Factory is small on purpose. Ten concepts, one presenter style, one static grammar, cut for three channels and pushed on one day.
The Performance Machine is where the difference is. The Meta ad is a form. The LinkedIn ad is a peer's post. The Google ad lands on a subdomain the marketing site does not know about. Every channel has its own funnel, and none of them is the homepage.
Volume is not the play here. Placement is.
And the pricing slider does the rest.
Break down your own market
Everything above came from public ad activity read at scale. The Sprites ads library does this for any advertiser, and creative analytics does it for your own account: every live ad, the hooks, the landing pages and what changed this month.
More: the Viktor AI ads teardown, the best Facebook ad spy tools and Facebook Ad Library alternatives.