The AI Conference Optimized for Humans: Inside Smartly’s Growth Summit
It’s tough to capture what makes Smartly’s Growth Summit special.
Like most conferences, at a high-level, the goal of the conference was to Learn, Connect, and Inspire. And yes, of course, there were lanyards. There were breakout sessions. There were bleary eyes on Day 2, desperate for caffeine.
Can you even call yourself a conference without those essentials?
But here’s what made it different. As we know, adtech is evolving at an almost unimaginable speed. Everyone recognizes that AI is changing advertising, and all of us must change with it. Marketing and creative potential are accelerating. AI is leading to tighter orchestration and better outcomes. And ultimately, consumers want creative diversity, personalized experiences, and authenticity from their advertising.
But Smartly is the category leader in AI-powered adtech because it’s continually focused on the advertising community, and not just what’s possible from a technical standpoint.
That hyper-focus on the human element of adtech has always been what’s guided Smartly as a company. And it naturally guided Growth Summit, which celebrates the community of Smartly’s customers - the very people who expect the most from the platform, and trust it to deliver.
To that end, the programming was built entirely around the results of a survey that captured what attendees actually wanted to learn this year. Most conferences optimize for attendance. Very few optimize for what attendees actually came for.
Here were the top five asks from the attendees:
- The Smartly Roadmap: Where We’re Going (65%)
- Media: Cross-Channel Performance (65%)
- AI Orchestration: Always-on Automation (52%)
- Creative: Diversity/Personalization/Net Zero Production (51%)
- Collaboration: Better Alignment Across Teams (48%)
The Smartly Roadmap
Smartly had some incredibly exciting announcements at Growth Summit this year - partnerships that signal major evolutions of both the industry and the platform itself.
Incrmntal acquisition
And speaking of best-in-class partnerships, Smartly also announced a letter of intent to purchase Incrmntal, a privacy-first measurement platform that replaces attribution with incrementality to demonstrate what part of your marketing is actually working. Incrmntal provides true incremental attribution without the hassles of A/B tests.
Smartly’s announced intent to acquire Incrmntal signals a move toward more transparent, outcome-driven marketing for both current and future customers. By integrating incrementality-based measurement directly into the platform, Smartly is aiming to give brands a clearer view of what’s actually driving growth, beyond traditional attribution models and without relying on user-level tracking.
For marketers, that means more confidence in where to invest, better optimization decisions in real time, and a step toward a more privacy-first approach to performance marketing.
Big Bets
Beyond partnerships, Smartly outlined its ‘Big Bets’ for 2026, where the platform is investing to shape the future of advertising. These included:
Product Innovation & Quality
- Creative Suite
- Brand Pulse (real-time, cross-channel deduplicated reach, frequency, and attention measurement)
- Cross-channel Predictive Budget Allocation
- Intelligence Suite
- Channel Expansion (Amazon and YouTube)
- Conversational Commerce
CTV
- DSP/Creative Technology
- Full Suite Capability (Media & Creative)
- Short and Long Form Video
AI Orchestration
- From Idea to Ad, to Campaign, to Outcome
All of our announcements reinforced an approach to product development rooted in human and machine collaboration — adapted to the needs of our customers and their consumers — while leveraging an “AI First, AI Everyday” philosophy to provide real-time accountability.
Media: Cross-Channel Performance
The summit reinforced the shift from channel-by-channel optimization to truly unified, full-funnel, cross-channel performance. We also announced an expansion of Brand Pulse, providing cross-channel reach, frequency, and attention insights for CTV, YouTube, and social via upcoming partnerships with Amazon and YouTube.
Across sessions and platform demos, the focus was on bringing planning, activation, and measurement into a single system, where budget, creative, and audiences can be coordinated in real time across social and other channels. Rather than optimizing toward siloed KPIs, teams are increasingly prioritizing total business impact, using blended signals and incrementality to understand how channels work together.
The takeaway: Performance marketing is no longer about mastering one channel, but orchestrating them as a connected system; and Smartly is positioning itself to support that shift with expanded cross-channel capabilities.
AI Orchestration: Always-on Automation
AI was positioned not as a feature, but as the indispensable operating layer powering the most effective marketing. Product walkthroughs and customer examples showed how automation is now handling everything from budget allocation and predictions to creative rotation, continuously learning and adapting based on live performance signals.
The focus was on “always-on” systems that reduce manual intervention and enable faster, more consistent optimization at scale. What stood out is how quickly this is moving from experimentation to expectation: the advantage no longer comes from using AI, but from how deeply it’s embedded across the entire workflow.
Collaboration is critical: Equal emphasis was placed on the importance of collaboration and control, and the need for a human-in-the-loop approach to help define boundaries and preview actions before execution.
Creative: Diversity, Personalization & Net-Zero Production
While many in the industry worry that creativity is the cost of performance, we proved that it’s actually the primary driver of performance, with a strong emphasis on increasing volume and diversity to improve relevance and response. We announced new offerings — Predictive Creative Performance (Alpha) and Video Best Practices Scoring (Alpha) — that will drive competitive edge moving forward.
Sessions also highlighted how teams are using modular frameworks and AI-powered generation to produce high volumes of personalized assets, tailored to different audiences and contexts, while integrating brand guidelines and governance. There’s also a push toward more efficient, “net-zero” production — reducing time, cost, and waste, while increasing output.
The shift is clear: Fewer large, infrequent campaigns and more continuous creative iteration, where testing, learning, and adaptation happen in real time.
Collaboration: Better Alignment Across Teams
As the platform evolves, so does the need for tighter alignment across media, creative, and intelligence. Smartly’s platform is built with next-gen intelligence at its core, including business, market, and consumer data combined with Smartly’s knowledge of native platforms and creative data.
A consistent theme across both product and customer sessions was the move toward shared systems, unified metrics, and more integrated workflows — reducing friction between teams and enabling faster decision-making. Rather than operating in silos, high-performing organizations are building around common goals and real-time visibility into performance.
Moves like the planned Incrmntal acquisition will be critical here in helping teams align around what actually drives incremental impact. The result is not just better efficiency, but stronger outcomes driven by teams working as a single, coordinated unit.
The takeaway: Removing silos and increasing visibility is critical to reducing friction and empowering faster decision-making.
Community, Curiosity, Collaboration
Beyond the sessions and announcements, Growth Summit is about something deeper: the community shaping the future of advertising. Across workshops, coffee conversations, and late-night discussions, attendees shared ideas, challenges, and new ways of thinking about growth.
Designing What Comes Next
If Growth Summit proved anything, it’s that when you build around what attendees actually want to learn, the conversation — and the industry — move forward faster. Growth Summit 2026 reminded us that growth is a cycle of testing, learning, refining, and building again.
As marketers design systems that learn and adapt, we’re also learning alongside them, discovering new patterns, new possibilities, and new ways to turn creativity into impact. Together, we’re shaping what comes next.
Want to see the technology behind the ideas? Schedule a demo.
The AI Conference Optimized for Humans: Inside Smartly’s Growth Summit
It’s tough to capture what makes Smartly’s Growth Summit special.
Like most conferences, at a high-level, the goal of the conference was to Learn, Connect, and Inspire. And yes, of course, there were lanyards. There were breakout sessions. There were bleary eyes on Day 2, desperate for caffeine.
Can you even call yourself a conference without those essentials?
But here’s what made it different. As we know, adtech is evolving at an almost unimaginable speed. Everyone recognizes that AI is changing advertising, and all of us must change with it. Marketing and creative potential are accelerating. AI is leading to tighter orchestration and better outcomes. And ultimately, consumers want creative diversity, personalized experiences, and authenticity from their advertising.
But Smartly is the category leader in AI-powered adtech because it’s continually focused on the advertising community, and not just what’s possible from a technical standpoint.
That hyper-focus on the human element of adtech has always been what’s guided Smartly as a company. And it naturally guided Growth Summit, which celebrates the community of Smartly’s customers - the very people who expect the most from the platform, and trust it to deliver.
To that end, the programming was built entirely around the results of a survey that captured what attendees actually wanted to learn this year. Most conferences optimize for attendance. Very few optimize for what attendees actually came for.
Here were the top five asks from the attendees:
- The Smartly Roadmap: Where We’re Going (65%)
- Media: Cross-Channel Performance (65%)
- AI Orchestration: Always-on Automation (52%)
- Creative: Diversity/Personalization/Net Zero Production (51%)
- Collaboration: Better Alignment Across Teams (48%)
The Smartly Roadmap
Smartly had some incredibly exciting announcements at Growth Summit this year - partnerships that signal major evolutions of both the industry and the platform itself.
Incrmntal acquisition
And speaking of best-in-class partnerships, Smartly also announced a letter of intent to purchase Incrmntal, a privacy-first measurement platform that replaces attribution with incrementality to demonstrate what part of your marketing is actually working. Incrmntal provides true incremental attribution without the hassles of A/B tests.
Smartly’s announced intent to acquire Incrmntal signals a move toward more transparent, outcome-driven marketing for both current and future customers. By integrating incrementality-based measurement directly into the platform, Smartly is aiming to give brands a clearer view of what’s actually driving growth, beyond traditional attribution models and without relying on user-level tracking.
For marketers, that means more confidence in where to invest, better optimization decisions in real time, and a step toward a more privacy-first approach to performance marketing.
Big Bets
Beyond partnerships, Smartly outlined its ‘Big Bets’ for 2026, where the platform is investing to shape the future of advertising. These included:
Product Innovation & Quality
- Creative Suite
- Brand Pulse (real-time, cross-channel deduplicated reach, frequency, and attention measurement)
- Cross-channel Predictive Budget Allocation
- Intelligence Suite
- Channel Expansion (Amazon and YouTube)
- Conversational Commerce
CTV
- DSP/Creative Technology
- Full Suite Capability (Media & Creative)
- Short and Long Form Video
AI Orchestration
- From Idea to Ad, to Campaign, to Outcome
All of our announcements reinforced an approach to product development rooted in human and machine collaboration — adapted to the needs of our customers and their consumers — while leveraging an “AI First, AI Everyday” philosophy to provide real-time accountability.
Media: Cross-Channel Performance
The summit reinforced the shift from channel-by-channel optimization to truly unified, full-funnel, cross-channel performance. We also announced an expansion of Brand Pulse, providing cross-channel reach, frequency, and attention insights for CTV, YouTube, and social via upcoming partnerships with Amazon and YouTube.
Across sessions and platform demos, the focus was on bringing planning, activation, and measurement into a single system, where budget, creative, and audiences can be coordinated in real time across social and other channels. Rather than optimizing toward siloed KPIs, teams are increasingly prioritizing total business impact, using blended signals and incrementality to understand how channels work together.
The takeaway: Performance marketing is no longer about mastering one channel, but orchestrating them as a connected system; and Smartly is positioning itself to support that shift with expanded cross-channel capabilities.
AI Orchestration: Always-on Automation
AI was positioned not as a feature, but as the indispensable operating layer powering the most effective marketing. Product walkthroughs and customer examples showed how automation is now handling everything from budget allocation and predictions to creative rotation, continuously learning and adapting based on live performance signals.
The focus was on “always-on” systems that reduce manual intervention and enable faster, more consistent optimization at scale. What stood out is how quickly this is moving from experimentation to expectation: the advantage no longer comes from using AI, but from how deeply it’s embedded across the entire workflow.
Collaboration is critical: Equal emphasis was placed on the importance of collaboration and control, and the need for a human-in-the-loop approach to help define boundaries and preview actions before execution.
Creative: Diversity, Personalization & Net-Zero Production
While many in the industry worry that creativity is the cost of performance, we proved that it’s actually the primary driver of performance, with a strong emphasis on increasing volume and diversity to improve relevance and response. We announced new offerings — Predictive Creative Performance (Alpha) and Video Best Practices Scoring (Alpha) — that will drive competitive edge moving forward.
Sessions also highlighted how teams are using modular frameworks and AI-powered generation to produce high volumes of personalized assets, tailored to different audiences and contexts, while integrating brand guidelines and governance. There’s also a push toward more efficient, “net-zero” production — reducing time, cost, and waste, while increasing output.
The shift is clear: Fewer large, infrequent campaigns and more continuous creative iteration, where testing, learning, and adaptation happen in real time.
Collaboration: Better Alignment Across Teams
As the platform evolves, so does the need for tighter alignment across media, creative, and intelligence. Smartly’s platform is built with next-gen intelligence at its core, including business, market, and consumer data combined with Smartly’s knowledge of native platforms and creative data.
A consistent theme across both product and customer sessions was the move toward shared systems, unified metrics, and more integrated workflows — reducing friction between teams and enabling faster decision-making. Rather than operating in silos, high-performing organizations are building around common goals and real-time visibility into performance.
Moves like the planned Incrmntal acquisition will be critical here in helping teams align around what actually drives incremental impact. The result is not just better efficiency, but stronger outcomes driven by teams working as a single, coordinated unit.
The takeaway: Removing silos and increasing visibility is critical to reducing friction and empowering faster decision-making.
Community, Curiosity, Collaboration
Beyond the sessions and announcements, Growth Summit is about something deeper: the community shaping the future of advertising. Across workshops, coffee conversations, and late-night discussions, attendees shared ideas, challenges, and new ways of thinking about growth.
Designing What Comes Next
If Growth Summit proved anything, it’s that when you build around what attendees actually want to learn, the conversation — and the industry — move forward faster. Growth Summit 2026 reminded us that growth is a cycle of testing, learning, refining, and building again.
As marketers design systems that learn and adapt, we’re also learning alongside them, discovering new patterns, new possibilities, and new ways to turn creativity into impact. Together, we’re shaping what comes next.
Want to see the technology behind the ideas? Schedule a demo.
Honestly, we'd rather just show you.
Chat with our team to see how Smartly transforms the fragmented advertising ecosystem into something suspiciously manageable.
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