Smartly Innovation, Technology & Agility

Describe Smartly’s relationship with AI. What’s the user value in the AI in your product, and what makes this unique?

Smartly is an AI-powered adtech company with a mission to transform the advertising experience for brands and consumers. Our advertising platform combines media, creative and intelligence, offering end-to-end workflows powered by AI across the open and closed web. 

We have been investing in AI solutions for the past decade, deeply integrating AI across our product offering. We use AI for media optimization to enhance our customers’ advertising performance. This includes predictive budget allocation, which leverages real-time data to dynamically adjust strategies and maximize budget efficiency. We also use AI for creative optimization, combining dynamic creative optimization with creative intelligence. This allows customers to test ad creatives at scale and easily refine them based on audience preferences.

What sets us apart is our ability to connect creative and media optimization in a unique way. Our AI can improve creatives at scale based on real-time performance metrics, helping customers optimize ad spend and continuously iterate to build the best possible creatives tailored to each specific audience.

Tell the story of how AI has evolved at Smartly. What was life like for customers before it was used, and what are your product teammates excited about when it comes to the future of AI at Smartly?

At Smartly, our journey with AI began with more traditional machine learning, as we developed automatic optimization capabilities for large-scale advertisers. Before AI, our customers had to optimize their advertising strategies manually, which was not only time-consuming, but also made it nearly impossible to achieve the same level of performance gains. 

As the AI landscape evolved and expanded, so did we. Although generative AI has been trending only recently, we made strategic investments in Gen AI before it gained popularity. For example, we acquired a Silicon Valley startup that has been a part of our AI journey. 

With AI at Smartly’s core, it’s no surprise that we have a large number of advanced customers already successfully using Gen AI to enhance ad creatives and optimize marketing workflows. In addition to our top-performing early adopters, another significant portion of our customer base has begun testing and integrating Gen AI into their processes. While leveraging Gen AI with Smartly continues to grow rapidly, we know there’s still untapped potential that we’re excited to unlock.

What opportunities do Smartly employees have to advance their AI careers?

Since AI is central to everything we do, all of our employees should have a solid understanding of the AI capabilities we offer. That’s why we provide subject matter expert programs that allow those who are in customer-facing roles to become experts in our AI solutions and how they can address customer challenges. SME programs enable hands-on learning and engaging in deep AI discussions with customers.

Technical roles offer great opportunities to collaborate closely with AI, particularly within our data science and engineering teams. Our data scientists focus on experimentation and new AI models, while engineers work on incorporating these AI advancements into their own product areas. This means engineers, designers and product managers get to work hands-on with AI technologies, collaborating on cutting-edge projects that shape the future of digital advertising.

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
Smartly’s relationship with AI isn’t a recent bolt-on — it’s the spine that has held our platform together since day one. Because we serve the entire advertising journey, our machine learning layer has context across both the creative and media sides of a marketer’s world. That dual vantage point lets us extract insights, scale creatives and optimize media with a holistic view.

When generative AI exploded onto the scene, we didn’t scramble to retrofit; we accelerated. Today, Smartly uses AI to help you go from idea to ad and powers workflows such as pulling a product page, generating on-brand backgrounds, crafting copy variations based on your brand voice, assembling channel-specific aspect ratios and optimizing campaign budgets — often before a human could have built the first brief.

The result for our customers is measurable: faster launch cycles, leaner production budgets and media spend that continuously self-optimizes. Our unique story is simple: Smartly goes beyond isolated AI features by powering the entire marketing engine — transforming sparks of inspiration into business outcomes at high speed and scale. Our blog would read: “From Idea to Ad and Beyond.”

What was a monumental moment for your team when it comes to your work with AI?
A key milestone for our AI work came when we launched the Smartly AI Studio in general availability earlier this year. With that release, our customers gained practical tools to transform a single static asset into channel-ready videos, build ads straight from a URL at scale, reshape raw footage into new narrative cuts and much more. We’ve seen a 30x increase in productivity and 27 percent improved performance in our AI Studio case studies, and we’re excited to be improving on these gains going forward.

Looking ahead, we’re focused on extending those gains beyond creative production. Two examples of such improvements include AI search and conversational insights. AI search adds a multimodal layer over historical assets and results. A natural-language query like “Christmas-themed holiday videos” now surfaces the relevant creatives in seconds. Conversational Insights offers a chat interface for performance questions. Rather than dig through metrics and reports yourself, let AI do the work and surface the insights automatically.

Our next chapter at Smartly is about turning AI from a feature into a steady partner in solving more complex challenges and workflows.