Legal

1. What ITSBEENDONE Is

ITSBEENDONE™ (“IBD”, “we”, “us”) is a free creative research tool that helps advertising professionals check whether a campaign concept has been executed before. The service operates at itsbeendone.com and is provided as-is, without subscription or payment.

By accessing or using the site, you agree to these Terms of Use. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

2. Who Can Use IBD

The service is available to anyone. We do not collect user accounts or require registration. Use of this service implies acceptance of these terms.

3. The Campaign Database

The IBD database is compiled from publicly accessible creative award archives and showcases, including Ads of the World, Clio Awards, The One Show, D&AD, London International Awards, Epica, Cannes Lions, Applied Arts, Concours Idéa, and the Canadian Marketing, AToMiC and Strategy Awards. All campaign information has been sourced from public-facing pages of these platforms.

We do not claim ownership of any campaign content, brand assets, or creative work displayed through the service. All such materials remain the property of their respective rights holders.

The database is provided for reference and research purposes only. We make no guarantees as to its completeness, accuracy, or currency.

4. The Freshness Score

The Freshness Score is a similarity metric generated by our system. It is a computational estimate, not a legal determination. IBD makes no representation that a high Freshness Score guarantees the originality of an idea, nor that a low score constitutes proof of infringement.

Users are solely responsible for their own creative and legal decisions based on search results.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use the service for any unlawful purpose
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, scrape, or extract the database in bulk
• Misrepresent search results as legal clearance or originality certification
• Use automated tools to query the service at a rate that disrupts normal operation

6. Intellectual Property

The ITSBEENDONE™ name, logo, interface design, search architecture, and Freshness Score methodology are the intellectual property of the IBD team. The campaign data displayed through the service belongs to the respective rights holders from whom it originates.

Nothing in these Terms grants you any license to reproduce, resell, or redistribute the database or any portion of it.

7. Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR COMPLETE.

8. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, IBD and its team shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of, or inability to use, the service — including but not limited to creative decisions made in reliance on search results.

9. Third-Party Content

The service displays metadata and references sourced from third-party platforms. We are not responsible for the accuracy of information as originally published by those platforms, nor for changes made to that content after the date it was indexed by IBD.

If you are a rights holder and believe content should be removed from the IBD database, please contact us at: hello@itsbeendone.com

10. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Changes will be reflected on this page with an updated effective date. Continued use of the service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

1. No Accounts, No Personal Data

IBD does not require registration. We do not collect names, email addresses, or any information that directly identifies you. You use the service anonymously.

2. Search Query Data

When you perform a search on IBD, the text you type is recorded on our servers, together with technical measurements of how the search performed. This is our primary data interest, and we want to be precise about it.

For each search we store:

• The query text, exactly as you typed it
• Which campaigns were returned, and how closely they matched
• Whether our language-model reviewer was consulted, and what it concluded
• Timing and cost measurements for the search itself

We use this to find where the engine fails, to tune how results are ranked, and to see which subjects are missing from the archive. Nothing is linked to an account, a cookie, or your IP address — we know what was searched and when, never by whom.

3. Please Don't Paste Confidential Briefs

Search queries are stored as plain text for up to 90 days, and are transmitted to Google for processing (see section 4). We treat them carefully, but we cannot make them secret.

If an idea is under embargo, covered by an NDA, or otherwise confidential, describe it in general terms rather than pasting the brief. The engine works on the underlying idea, not on wording — a short generic description will search just as well.

4. Third-Party Processing of Your Query

IBD does not run its own language models. To answer a search, your query is sent to:

• Google (Gemini API) — to convert your query into a numerical representation, and, when a close match exists, to judge whether the concept has genuinely been done before
• Qdrant — our vector database provider, which performs the similarity search
• Turso — our database provider, which stores the search log described above

These providers process the query on our behalf and under their own terms. We send them your query text; we never send anything identifying you, because we do not have it.

5. Automatically Collected Technical Data

Like most web services, our servers automatically record standard technical information when you access the site, including:

• IP address — used only to limit how many searches one visitor can run per minute. It is held in memory for that minute and is never written to our database or attached to a query.
• Browser type and version
• Referring URL
• Date and time of access

This information is used solely for operational purposes and is not used to identify or profile individual users.

6. No Analytics, No Cookies, No Ads

IBD runs no analytics platform. There is no Google Analytics, no tracking pixel, and no third-party script watching what you do on the site. We set no cookies of any kind.

IBD is ad-free and we do not share data with advertisers. The only circumstances under which data might be disclosed are:

• If required by law or a valid legal process
• To protect the security or integrity of the service

7. Data Retention

Search records — including the query text — are deleted 90 days after they are made. Aggregate statistics derived from them (counts, score distributions, quality measurements) contain no query text and may be kept indefinitely to track whether the engine is improving.

Standard server logs, including IP addresses, are deleted on the same 90-day rolling basis.

8. Your Rights

Because we hold nothing that identifies you, we cannot look up “your” searches — there is no account, cookie or identifier to match them against. That limits the usual rights of access and correction, but it also means there is no profile of you to begin with.

What we can do: if you recognise a specific query you would like removed, send us the wording and the approximate date and we will delete the matching record. In any case, every search record is erased 90 days after it is made.

• If you are an EU/EEA resident and have concerns under GDPR, contact us at hello@itsbeendone.com
• If you are a Quebec resident and have concerns under Law 25, contact us at hello@itsbeendone.com

We will respond to any legitimate privacy inquiry within 30 days.

9. International Users

IBD is operated from Canada. By using the service, you acknowledge that your data (including search queries) may be processed and stored in Canada or other countries where our infrastructure providers operate.

10. Contact

Questions about these Terms or this Privacy Policy? Reach us at: hello@itsbeendone.com

This document was last updated in August 2026. ITSBEENDONE™ is an independent project. It is not affiliated with D&AD, The One Show, Clio Awards, or Ads of the World.