Video Ad Creative Breakdown - TikTok, Reels, YouTube & Files

What does Video Ad Creative Breakdown do?

Video Ad Creative Breakdown turns public TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube videos and Shorts, or your own ad and short-form video files, into a structured creative breakdown: the hook (what is said and what is written on screen in the first 3 seconds, plus the first frame), a shot list with a keyframe, on-screen text and speech for every shot, the full transcript, pacing numbers (cuts per minute, average shot length, words per minute, how much of the video has text on screen) and a simple hook / body / CTA structure. Each video also gets a contact sheet image, a JSON file and a ready-to-paste Markdown creative brief.

Paste public video links (a TikTok video, an Instagram reel or post, a YouTube video or Short) or direct links to video files (your creatives on Google Drive, Dropbox, S3/R2/GCS, a CDN). One row per video, $0.025 per video up to 3 minutes - the same price for links and files.

Who is it for?

• Brands and in-house creative teams auditing their own ad library: which hooks, pacing and CTAs the winning ads share.
• Performance and UGC agencies that receive dozens of creator videos a week and need the same teardown for every one.
• Media buyers tagging creatives before a test: hook type, cut speed, text density, CTA.
• Ad and UGC researchers studying public TikToks, Reels and Shorts: paste the links, get the same teardown for every video.
• Teams with ad files saved from ad libraries or their own ad manager (link the files directly).
• AI workflows: the brief and JSON are made to be pasted into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, or sent through n8n / Make / Zapier.

What you get for every video

Part	What is inside
Hook	speech of the first 3 s, on-screen text of the first 3 s, first-frame image, shots in the hook, time of the first cut, first full sentence
Shot list	start / end / length, transition (cut, dissolve, fade), keyframe image, on-screen text and speech per shot
Transcript	Whisper speech recognition with word timing, split into timed sentences, language detected
On-screen text	every caption, title, offer and end card with start / end time and position; logos and watermarks flagged as persistent
Pacing	shot count, cuts per minute, average / median / shortest / longest shot, time to first cut, words per minute, speech share, text-on-screen share
Structure	hook / body / CTA sections with their time ranges, shots, speech and text
CTA	the closing on-screen text and closing line, plus signals found in them: links, phone numbers, @handles, prices / % off, and CTA phrases (shop now, visit, sign up, download, use code...)
Files	contact sheet (one keyframe per shot, labelled), full JSON, Markdown creative brief

How the breakdown is made (no LLM inside)

Nothing in the output is written by a language model, so the same video always gives the same breakdown:

• Shots come from our own cut detector (the one behind Video Scene Detection): hard cuts, dissolves and fades, with flash and camera-motion rejection.
• Speech is OpenAI Whisper (base model) running inside the Actor, with word timestamps.
• On-screen text is PP-OCR (the engine behind Video OCR), read twice a second in the hook, about once a second after that (wider on long videos), and at least once in every shot.
• Hook / body / CTA is a fixed rule: the hook is the first 3 seconds (you can change it); the CTA is the closing section: the last on-screen text (end card) and the last spoken sentence, when they start in the closing part of the video (last 35 %, at most the last 30 s). The CTA section starts at the end card, or at the last line when that line leads straight into the card (or when there is no card). Everything in between is the body. cta.hasSignals tells you whether a link, phone number, @handle, price or call-to-action phrase was actually found there.

That makes the output a clean, factual input for your own AI: paste the Markdown brief (and the contact sheet) into ChatGPT or Claude and ask for a hook rating, hook variations, a script rewrite or a comparison across ads.

How to break down an ad video

1. Put one or more links in Video links, one per line: public TikTok videos (including vm.tiktok.com share links), Instagram reels or single-video posts, YouTube videos or Shorts, or direct video file links (MP4, MOV, WEBM, MKV, M4V...). Google Drive and Dropbox share links work when shared as "anyone with the link".
2. Optional: set the spoken language (auto-detect by default), the on-screen text script (English by default; Latin, Cyrillic, Korean, Arabic, Devanagari, Greek, Thai available) and the hook length.
3. Click Start. Each video becomes one row; open Creative brief (.md) or the contact sheet from the Videos view, or use the Shot list and Transcript views.

TikTok, Instagram and YouTube links

• Public videos only. The Actor visits the link like a logged-out viewer (no account, no cookies) through Apify Proxy. Private, removed, age-restricted, members-only or region-locked videos cannot be read - they become free rows with the reason.
• One video per link. Channels, profiles, playlists, hashtags, photo slideshows and live streams are refused (free).
• Platforms sometimes ask logged-out visitors to sign in ("confirm you're not a bot"). The Actor retries on other proxy IPs; if the platform still refuses, the row is free and says so - run that link again later. This happens most on YouTube.
• Video is fetched at up to 1080p (H.264 preferred), so platform videos are billed at the base price.
• Rows from links also carry platform, sourceUrl, videoId, title, author, authorHandle, caption, uploadDate, viewCount, likeCount and commentCount (whatever the platform shows publicly; empty when it does not).
• Only analyse videos you are allowed to use: your own, your clients', or for research and commentary. Facebook, X, Vimeo, Twitch and other sites stay unsupported.

Input example

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/@brand/video/7300000000000000000",
    "https://www.instagram.com/reel/AbCdEfGhIjK/",
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AbCdEfGhIjK",
    "https://your-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/ads/summer-sale-v3.mp4",
    "https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AbC.../view?usp=sharing"
  ],
  "language": "auto",
  "ocrLanguage": "en",
  "hookSeconds": 3
}

Output example

One row per video. Real output of the built-in sample (a 30-second public-domain CDC TV ad), shortened - the full row also has every shot, sentence and text segment, plus structure with the speech and text of each section:

{
  "fileName": "sample-creative-ad.mp4",
  "status": "ok",
  "durationSeconds": 30.21,
  "aspectRatio": "16:9",
  "orientation": "horizontal",
  "hook": {
    "seconds": 3,
    "speech": "",
    "onScreenText": ["A TIP FROM A
FORMER
SMOKER"],
    "onScreenTextJoined": "A TIP FROM A FORMER SMOKER",
    "frameUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store>/records/...-hook-first-frame.jpg?signature=...",
    "shotCount": 1,
    "firstCutSeconds": null,
    "firstSentence": "My name is Brett and I used to smoke."
  },
  "pacing": {
    "shotCount": 4, "cutCount": 3, "cutsPerMinute": 6, "averageShotSeconds": 7.54, "medianShotSeconds": 3.45,
    "shortestShotSeconds": 3.04, "longestShotSeconds": 20.22, "timeToFirstCutSeconds": 3.04,
    "wordCount": 47, "wordsPerMinute": 93, "speechShare": 0.398, "textOnScreenShare": 0.47
  },
  "cta": {
    "found": true,
    "startSeconds": 26.46,
    "onScreenText": "YOU CAN QUIT.
FOR FREE HELP, VISIT
CDC.GOV/TIPS
CDC
Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
#CDCTips",
    "speech": "For free help visit cdc.gov slash tips",
    "signals": ["link: CDC.GOV/TIPS", "link: cdc.gov", "phrase: visit"],
    "hasSignals": true
  },
  "shots": [
    {
      "index": 2, "start": 3.036, "end": 23.257, "durationSeconds": 20.22, "transition": "cut",
      "keyframeUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store>/records/...-shot002-00013000ms.jpg?signature=...",
      "onScreenText": ["Brett, 49
New Mexico"],
      "speech": "My name is Brett and I used to smoke. I quit. But not until I got a serious gum disease. ..."
    }
  ],
  "transcript": {
    "status": "ok", "language": "en", "model": "Whisper base", "wordCount": 47,
    "sentences": [{"start": 3.18, "end": 5.06, "text": "My name is Brett and I used to smoke."}]
  },
  "onScreenText": [
    {"start": 3, "end": 7.5, "text": "Brett, 49
New Mexico", "position": "bottom", "confidence": 0.9731, "isPersistent": false}
  ],
  "contactSheetUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store>/records/...-contact-sheet.jpg?signature=...",
  "briefUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store>/records/...-creative-brief.md?signature=...",
  "jsonUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store>/records/...-breakdown.json?signature=...",
  "billingMultiplier": 1,
  "billedVideos": 1,
  "billedExtraMinutes": 0
}

The Console has three views: Videos (contact sheet, hook, pacing, CTA, brief link), Shot list (one line per shot with its keyframe) and Transcript.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event, no subscription and no start fee beyond Apify's tiny default:

Event	Price	When
Video	$0.025	each video broken down; covers the first 3 minutes
Extra minute	$0.01	each started minute beyond 3 minutes

Worked examples: 100 ads of 15-60 seconds = $2.50. A 4:30 video = $0.025 + 2 x $0.01 = $0.045. Silver and Gold Apify plans get 10 % and 20 % off.

Videos up to 1080p (including vertical 1080x1920 and 1080x1350) are billed as above. Larger frames cost more to decode, so each started 2.2 megapixels counts once: 1440p = 2 videos, 4K = 4 videos (the row shows billingMultiplier and a note). Export or upload ads at 1080p to pay the base price.

Free: private, removed or blocked TikTok / Instagram / YouTube videos, unsupported sites, failed downloads (404, private file, web page, image or audio file instead of a video), unreadable files and files without a picture. Every free row says why, in plain words. Set Max cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly before a video that would go over it (that video and the rest get free "skipped" rows). The run timeout is respected the same way: a video that cannot finish before your run timeout is not started (or is stopped), gets a free "skipped" row that names the timeout to set, and the run still ends as Succeeded. Skipped rows carry skipReason: max-cost or timeout. Short API / n8n / AI-agent timeouts: allow about 70-100 s for one 30-second video and about 50 s more for each further one.

Good to know

• Videos without speech (music-only ads, silent text ads) are still broken down - shots, on-screen text, pacing - and the transcript says "no-speech" or "no-audio".
• CTA phrases are matched in English; links, phone numbers, @handles and prices are found in any language.
• Whisper base can misspell brand and product names; OCR can misread very stylised fonts, and moving or word-by-word captions may appear as several pieces.
• Animated titles that jump between positions can count as cuts; very slow dissolves may be missed.
• Videos up to 15 minutes by default (up to 120 with "Max video length").

Related Kanto Labs Actors

• Video OCR - every piece of on-screen text in a video, with SRT/VTT.
• Video Scene Detection & Shot List - cut timecodes, CSV, EDL and clips for editors.
• Video to LLM Context - keyframes + transcript per scene for AI agents.
• Video Frame Extractor - keyframes, scene frames and thumbnails.

FAQ

Can it analyse a TikTok, Reels or YouTube link? Yes - public single videos, logged out, at the same price as a file. If the platform will not serve the video to a logged-out visitor, the row is free and says why.

Does it use ChatGPT or another AI to write the breakdown? No. Speech recognition (Whisper) and text recognition (PP-OCR) run inside the Actor; everything else is measured or rule-based. That keeps it cheap and repeatable, and you keep full control of the AI step.

How accurate is the hook / body / CTA split? It is a rule, not an opinion: hook = first N seconds, CTA = closing text + closing line. It is right for typical direct-response ads; for stories without an end card the CTA may be missing (the row says so).

Is my video stored? Only the outputs (images, JSON, brief) are saved in your own Apify storage. The downloaded video is deleted when the run ends.

Is this an official TikTok, Instagram or YouTube tool? No. It is an independent Actor by Kanto Labs and is not affiliated with or endorsed by TikTok, Instagram/Meta or YouTube/Google.

Something looks wrong? Open an issue in the Issues tab with the video link and what you expected - we answer quickly.