Competitor Comparison Ads: When Naming Your Rival Works, and When It Backfires

The ad that made me laugh, then made me think

I watched a ClickUp ad on YouTube recently that made me laugh at first. Then I realized it was subtly making fun of their competitor Jira using puns and jokes.

You can watch the ad here.

I haven't used ClickUp or Jira myself. But the way ClickUp presented their story felt like they delivered a perfectly timed comedic punch to Jira. The ad was amusing and slightly mocking, teasing their competitor in a light-hearted way.

I'm still unsure how to feel about it. ClickUp took a bold approach, and it did make me laugh. But I'm undecided about whether I'd recommend it to a client.

That uncertainty is worth writing about, because most businesses face the same question in a smaller form. Do you name the competitor? Do you bid on their brand? Do you build a comparison page? Or do you stay quiet and sell on your own merits?

Three levels of competitor comparison advertising

People mix these up constantly. They carry completely different risk.

1. Direct comparison creative

You name the competitor in the ad itself. Video, display, social. The ClickUp ad sits here. The competitor is identifiable, the joke lands on them, and the viewer is asked to pick a side.

This is not a new format. Apple's "Get a Mac" spots ran on this exact structure — two characters, one of them clearly the rival. Pepsi built a whole campaign around a blind taste test against Coke. Wendy's has spent years needling the other burger chains by name on social. The format has a long history and a long track record of working for challengers.

2. Competitor keyword bidding

You don't name them in the creative, but you buy their brand terms in search. Someone types the rival's name, your ad shows. No mockery, just interception.

3. Comparison content

The "X vs Y" page. Feature tables, pricing side by side, migration guides. No tone, just documentation. This is the quietest version and usually the most durable one.

Level 1 is a brand decision. Level 2 is a budget and policy decision. Level 3 is a content decision. You can run level 3 for years without ever touching level 1.

What Google actually allows in the ad

This is the part most people get wrong, and it's the part that decides whether your campaign runs at all. Two separate rules, and they don't move together.

Trademarks as keywords

Google generally does not restrict trademarks as keywords in most regions. You can bid on a competitor's brand name. Google will not take the keyword down just because the trademark owner complains about it. Whether it's a good use of money is a different question — I'll get to that.

Trademarks in ad text

Tighter. Google runs a trademark complaint process, and when a trademark owner files, Google can restrict use of that term in ad text for other advertisers. There are exceptions — resellers and informational sites can qualify to use the term under Google's policy — but you have to fit the exception, and you have to apply. Assume the default is no.

The practical read: bidding on their name is usually fine, writing their name into your headline usually isn't. A lot of businesses build a whole comparison campaign around headlines they'll never be allowed to serve. Check the policy before you write the creative, not after your ads get disapproved.

Same logic applies on other platforms with their own trademark and brand-mention rules. Every network has some version of this. Read theirs.

The legal layer, briefly

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. But you should know the shape of the exposure before you name a competitor.

In the US, comparative advertising is legal and has been for decades. The FTC has long taken the position that truthful comparative advertising benefits consumers. Naming a competitor is not, on its own, a problem.

The problem is false or misleading claims. Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act lets a competitor sue you over false advertising — including claims about their product, not just yours. That's the real risk surface. Not the mockery. The factual assertion sitting inside the mockery.

Which gives you a workable test before you publish:

• Is every factual claim in the ad true today? Pricing pages change. Feature gaps close. A claim that was accurate at shoot time can go false by the time the ad is still running six months later.
• Can you document it? Screenshot, dated, saved. If you're claiming they don't do something, you want the receipt.
• Is the comparison apples to apples? Comparing your top tier to their entry tier is the classic way an otherwise true ad becomes misleading.
• Is it opinion or is it fact? "We think ours is friendlier" is opinion. "Theirs takes 40 minutes to set up" is a claim you have to be able to prove.

Notice what the ClickUp ad mostly does. It leans on tone and jokes rather than hard numeric claims about the competitor. That's not an accident. Humor is a lower-risk vehicle than a comparison chart, because a joke is harder to characterize as a false statement of fact.

The tradeoffs, laid out plainly

Approach	Upside	Downside
Name and mock the competitor	Memorable, positions you as the alternative, cheap earned attention	Advertises them too, ages badly, invites a response you may not want
Name them neutrally in a comparison page	Captures high-intent "vs" searches, easy to keep updated, no ad-text policy issue	Slow, requires honest feature accuracy or it reads as spin
Bid on their brand terms	Reaches people already in-market and shortlisting	Higher CPCs, lower quality scores, they can retaliate on your terms
Say nothing about competitors	Clean brand, no legal or policy risk	You leave the comparison to the buyer, who will make it anyway

Why the mocking version works when it works

Comedy at a competitor's expense does one thing very well: it makes the category feel like a two-horse race. If you're the challenger, that's free positioning. You just told everyone watching that you belong in the same sentence as the incumbent.

That's the whole trick. Nobody makes fun of a brand nobody has heard of. The joke only works if the audience already knows the target. So the challenger borrows the incumbent's recognition and uses it as a stage.

The cost is that you also introduce your competitor to people who hadn't considered them yet. Some share of viewers will go search the rival's name after watching. That's a real leak, and it's hard to measure.

It also explains why incumbents almost never punch back by name. Responding confirms the framing. The bigger brand's best move is usually silence.

Lean toward it if

• You're the challenger, not the incumbent.
• There is a real, specific, defensible difference — and you can document it.
• Your buyers already shortlist you two together. You're not creating the comparison, you're joining it.
• The claim survives the four-question test above.

Lean away from it if

• You're in a licensed or compliance-heavy category. When I launched a mortgage brokerage's first Google Ads Search campaign, the callout extensions had to carry NMLS license numbers to stay compliant. In categories like that, creative freedom is narrow and a joke at a competitor's expense is not worth the review risk.
• You're bigger than them. Punching down looks bad and hands them attention.
• You can't back the claim with something a buyer can verify in thirty seconds.
• Your differentiation is service quality rather than product features. Service quality doesn't compare well in a 30-second spot.

The lower-risk version I'd start with

If you want the upside without the tonal or policy risk, build the comparison page instead of the comparison ad.

Write an honest "us vs them" page. Include the cases where they're the better fit — that single move does more for credibility than any joke will. Then run search ads to that page on "[competitor] alternative" and "[competitor] vs" queries. The keyword is allowed. The comparison lives on your page where you control the wording and can update it the day something changes. Same intent, no ad-text policy fight, and the page keeps earning after the budget stops.

That's the version I'd start with in almost every account. You can always get bolder later. It's much harder to walk back a joke.

Before you spend a dollar on competitor terms

One caveat from inside real accounts, because competitor bidding is the level most people jump to first and it's the level most likely to quietly waste money.

Brand-adjacent search is dirty traffic by default. I audited one campaign that was spending 51% of its budget bidding on the advertiser's own brand name plus "free" seekers. Half the money, going to people who already knew the brand or were never going to buy.

The fix was 46 verified negative keywords across the account — one campaign's list went from 38 to 71, another from 5 to 18. Nothing clever. Just cutting the queries that were never going to convert.

Competitor queries carry the same junk. Their login page. Their support number. Their careers page. Their pricing complaints. If you buy the competitor's name without negatives for support, login, jobs, salary and free, you're paying to reach people who aren't shopping — they're stuck or they're applying for a job.

Add those negatives first. Then turn on the competitor terms.

Where I've landed, for now

The ClickUp ad worked on me. It made me laugh and it made me remember the brand. That's the entire job of a video ad, and it did it.

If I were advising a challenger brand with a real, provable difference and no compliance constraints, I'd say run something in that direction. Keep the sharp edges on tone, not on factual claims about the other company. Check the trademark policy before you write the headline. Save your receipts.

For everyone else — most businesses, most categories — build the comparison page, buy the "alternative" and "vs" keywords, and skip the joke. You get most of the intent with almost none of the risk.

If you're weighing a competitor campaign and want a second pair of eyes on it — whether the claim holds up, whether the keywords are worth the CPC, where the wasted spend is hiding like it was in that 51% account — you can book a time here and we'll go through your account together. No pressure either way.