Smartly and Amazon DSP Forge New Frontier for Connected TV Advertising

NEW YORK, NY – March 02, 2026 – In a move set to reshape the digital advertising landscape, AI-powered ad tech firm Smartly has announced a major integration with Amazon DSP. The partnership enables advertisers to seamlessly extend their video campaigns from social media into Amazon’s vast and premium Connected TV (CTV) ecosystem, including Prime Video, Fire TV, and a network of third-party publishers. This collaboration directly addresses the industry's growing demand for more sophisticated, measurable, and efficient advertising on the biggest screen in the house.

As streaming services supplant traditional television, advertiser dollars are following suit. However, the CTV space has been hampered by challenges that have prevented it from reaching its full potential. This new integration promises to bridge the gap, merging the data-rich, dynamic nature of social advertising with the immersive, high-impact environment of streaming television.

Taming the Wild West of CTV Advertising

The shift to CTV is undeniable. Industry reports indicate that nearly 70% of marketers are planning to increase their streaming ad budgets in the coming year, with projections showing CTV ad spend soaring past $40 billion by 2027. Yet, this rapid growth has created a complex and fragmented ecosystem that often feels like the Wild West for advertisers. Marketers have grappled with significant hurdles, including inconsistent measurement, difficulties in personalizing content at scale, and major creative production bottlenecks.

Unlike the relatively standardized world of social media feeds, the CTV landscape is a patchwork of different platforms, devices, and viewing apps. This fragmentation makes it difficult to track audience behavior, measure campaign effectiveness accurately, and apply frequency caps to avoid ad fatigue. Furthermore, producing high-quality, personalized video ads for multiple audience segments has traditionally been a costly and time-consuming endeavor, limiting the agility of many brands looking to enter or scale their CTV presence. Advertisers are no longer satisfied with simple reach and impression metrics; they are demanding the same level of performance accountability—such as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)—that they expect from other digital channels.

A Unified Workflow for a Fragmented Landscape

Smartly's integration with Amazon DSP is engineered to cut through this complexity by providing a centralized command center for cross-channel campaigns. The core of the new offering is the ability for advertisers to manage and optimize their Amazon DSP campaigns directly within the same Smartly platform they already use for social advertising. This unified workflow is a significant leap forward in operational efficiency.

By bringing streaming TV activation into an existing workflow, the integration eliminates the siloed approach that has plagued many marketing teams. Now, media buyers can plan, execute, and analyze campaigns across both social and CTV in one place, gaining a holistic view of performance in real-time. This allows for more agile budget reallocation, enabling brands to shift spending to the channels delivering the best results.

“Through this integration with Amazon DSP, advertisers and agencies who work with Smartly can now extend their proven social creative to premium streaming inventory in a fraction of the time—driving efficiency, expanding reach, and making streaming TV activation as simple as their social advertising,” said Erin McGee, Director, Partner and Advertiser Growth Marketing at Amazon Ads.

The Performance Play: Making Streaming Ads Measurable

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this partnership is its focus on bringing performance-driven precision to CTV. For years, the promise of CTV has been its potential to combine the rich storytelling of television with the targeting and measurability of digital. This integration aims to finally deliver on that promise.

By connecting creative insights, activation, and measurement in a single platform, the solution provides advertisers with unprecedented visibility into cross-channel creative performance. This enables the measurement of incremental reach—understanding how many new consumers a CTV campaign reached beyond a social campaign—and provides the data needed to make smarter, faster decisions. It transforms CTV from a channel primarily used for upper-funnel brand awareness into a full-funnel marketing tool capable of driving tangible business outcomes.

“As CTV matures, entertainment, commerce, and social are merging into one experience,” noted Melissa Yang, SVP of Ecosystems & AI Applications at Smartly. “This integration gives marketers the performance precision and creative intelligence they’ve long expected in CTV, enabling personalization at scale, real-time optimization, and full-funnel impact. With intelligent creative and direct access to Amazon’s premium supply, Smartly brings the rigor and accountability modern marketers rely on.”

Intelligent Creative Unlocks Premium Inventory

At the heart of the integration is Smartly's powerful AI engine, which automates and optimizes the creation of video and image assets. This technology directly tackles the creative bottleneck that has held back personalization in CTV. Instead of manually producing a handful of video ads, advertisers can now use Smartly's platform to dynamically generate thousands of creative variations tailored to different audiences, contexts, and placements.

This AI-driven creative capability means an advertiser can take a single core video asset and instantly adapt it with different product features, promotional offers, or calls-to-action based on Amazon's rich first-party data signals, such as shopping behavior and demographic information. A car manufacturer, for instance, could show an SUV ad to a family that has been browsing for larger vehicles on Amazon, while showing a sports car ad to a different user segment, all generated automatically from the same campaign.

This ability to deliver relevant advertising at speed and scale not only improves the viewer experience but also significantly boosts campaign effectiveness. It makes premium, brand-safe inventory on platforms like Prime Video and Fire TV more accessible and impactful for a wider range of advertisers, from global giants to nimble direct-to-consumer brands.

The integration is available globally, and while it already represents a significant advancement, both companies have indicated that more features are planned for rollout later in 2026. Industry experts anticipate these could include deeper support for interactive and shoppable ad formats, which are quickly gaining traction, as well as more advanced attribution models that leverage clean room technology to provide an even clearer picture of the customer journey from the social feed to the living room screen.