I Ran a Free Ad Leak Check on a Brooks Tube Poster. Here's What Leaked.

I spotted this Brooks poster on the Tube a couple of weeks back, and it's been nagging me ever since. Big blue background. BROOKS in letters the size of a small child. A shoe in mid-stride. And a line of copy that, if you covered the logo, could belong to literally any running brand on the planet.

I wasn't the first to notice. Credit where it's due... I found a lovely write-up on Tube Ad Critic, a site that does exactly what the name suggests. I genuinely enjoy reading his takes. It's one of those blogs where someone's clearly paying attention on their commute while the rest of us are scrolling reels about sourdough, and I recommend bookmarking it.

Anyway. He flagged it. I couldn't let it go. So I did what I do... I ran it through my own free Ad Leak Check to see where the money was falling out.

The setup

The ad's a classic OOH buy. Tube cross-track poster, brand campaign, no direct response. The job isn't to make you click, because you can't click a bit of printed card stuck to a wall at Oxford Circus. The job is mental availability... next time you're buying trainers, Brooks pops into your head before Nike or On do.

Fine. That's a valid ad job. But even brand ads have to earn their spend, and this one's got at least two places where it's quietly losing money.

Three reads, three places money can leak

The free check runs any ad through three structural gates. I'll name all three on this one, then show you exactly how I'd plug the biggest. The other two I'll leave for you to chew on.

Gate one: the three-second test. Does the ad tell you who's talking and what they sell before the Tube driver finishes saying "mind the gap"? This one passes. BROOKS in letters the size of a Mini, a shoe you can't miss, category obvious. Fine.

Gate two: the believability gap. Does the ad make a claim the reader can actually believe? This is where it bleeds. More in a second.

Gate three: the action trap. If this poster works, how would Brooks know? Have a proper look. Anything on there that lets them track a single pair of trainers sold because of it? I'll let you sit with that one.

The fix I'll actually show you

Here's the copy on the ad: "Wherever your destination, we are designing new ways to get you there. That's running redefined."

Read it again. Now cover the BROOKS wordmark with your thumb and ask yourself whose ad it is. Could be Nike. Could be On. Could be Hoka. Could be Asics. Could be a small startup nobody's heard of. The line "That's running redefined" is a brand promise with absolutely nothing underneath it. No product named, no technology named, no runner named, no testing result, no mileage figure, no story. Just a stock slogan any competitor could lift word-for-word and slap on their own billboard by Tuesday.

Brooks makes genuinely good shoes. The Ghost Max, the Glycerin, the Adrenaline GTS... proper product stories sitting in the cupboard, unused. The poster picked generic instead. Tube Ad Critic generously awarded it 3 stars out of 5.

The fix is to name something specific. Name the shoe, name the thing that actually got redefined, name the person it's for. Something like "The new Ghost Max 2. More cushioning than the last one. Built for people who end up running further than they planned." Now the claim has a product behind it, a change a reader can verify, and a runner who recognises themselves. It stops being a slogan and starts being a promise.

That's gate two fixed. Gates one and three... I'm keeping those, because if I gave the whole playbook away my accountant would give me a funny look over Christmas dinner.

What the free check gives you

If you've got an ad running right now... Tube, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, a fiver on a bus stop, doesn't matter... you can send it to me and get a free one-page Ad Leak Check back. Three structural reads, one leak fixed in full so you can see how it works, two more named so you know where to look.

Free means free. No call booking, no "just pop your number in", no seventeen-email nurture sequence, and I'll run it.

Worst case, you find out your ad's fine and I've wasted an afternoon. Best case, you stop funding a poster that could belong to anyone.