Category read 1, UK grocery, October 2026
We read every Meta and LinkedIn ad Aldi UK and Lidl GB had on file between 16 September and 17 October 2026. The measure is run length: how long a brand keeps paying for one ad. It's the one thing the ad libraries publish that tells you what a brand believes in.
On 17 October Aldi UK had 53 ads live on Meta. Every one of them started on or after 1 October. The median had been running 8 days. Lidl GB had 178 live, with a median of 15 days, and 30 of them had been running longer than a month.
Aldi's finished ads show it isn't a one-off. Of the 60 on file, 32 came down on the 1st or 2nd of a month. Only 8 started on those days. Ads go live whenever they're ready and come down when the month ends. “Check out this week's Super 6 offer” ran 32 days, from 1 May to 2 June 2026, and stopped at the turn of the month like the rest.
That changes how you read a short Aldi run. 15 of the 60 came down inside a week, and 5 of those had simply launched in the last week of a month. A short Aldi ad is often just a late one, not a failed test.
Of Lidl's 30 live ads older than a month, 18 sell Lidl Plus. The other 12 are job ads. Nothing else Lidl sells to shoppers has lasted that long.
The Lidl Plus ads are written store by store: “Guildford, collect points with Lidl Plus and choose your rewards”, then the same line for Wombwell, Solihull, Uttoxeter, Crewe and Gillingham. The first went live on 3 September. Across all 30 Lidl Plus ads, the median had been running 37 days on 17 October. Lidl's other consumer ads had a median of 10 days.
Between 27 April and 2 July 2026 Aldi ran 5 ads on one line: “We're loyal to low prices. Even without a loyalty app thingy.” The longest ran 31 days, from 1 June to 2 July.
The claim behind it hasn't gone away. On 29 July Aldi ran “That's 6 months of making your money go further”, citing Which?'s cheapest supermarket result. On 16 October the same ad came back as “That's 9 months”. Aldi doesn't keep this argument running in one ad. It re-runs it every month or so with the count moved on.
Two discounters are paying for opposite answers to the same question. One says the app is the reason to shop there. The other says you shouldn't need one.
Most of what Lidl runs on Meta is hiring: warehouse operatives in Exeter, Severn Beach and Motherwell, deputy store managers in Birmingham, graduate schemes, and a “Founding 400” push for a new site in Leeds. Aldi runs none of that on Meta. It does it on LinkedIn, where 50 of its 51 ads on file are store and head-office roles.
Lidl's LinkedIn goes somewhere else again. 10 of its 17 ads on file argue a public-health case: that balanced meals can be affordable, and that retailers should make healthy food the easy choice. Aldi uses LinkedIn to hire. Lidl uses it to talk to policy people.
Radar records competitors' ads from the Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and LinkedIn ad libraries every week, and keeps the creative after the platform link expires.