Wpromote x Giant Spoon partnered with Smartly on June 18, 2026, embedding the AI-powered advertising platform's creative and media activation tools into Polaris IQ, the agency's operating system for turning consumer insight into live campaign execution. The arrangement follows a structured pilot run across a broad set of client accounts, and it lands one day after Smartly disclosed a separate integration with Roku's advertising platform, positioning June 18 as the second stop in what has become a busy stretch of announcements for the New York-based company.

The numbers behind the pilot are specific, and they anchor the rest of the announcement. One client recorded a 29 percent increase in lower-funnel return on ad spend while cutting media spend by 26 percent, a result the companies attribute to Smartly's Predictive Budget Allocation tool. Manual reporting time, meanwhile, fell by as much as 93 percent, according to the companies. Campaign builds that previously required market-by-market production now deploy across 50 geo-targeted markets within the same production window that once covered a fraction of that footprint.

What the partnership actually connects

At the technical level, the deal places Smartly's activation layer inside Polaris IQ rather than alongside it. Polaris IQ is described by Wpromote x Giant Spoon as the operating system through which the agency converts consumer insight into in-market execution; the partnership folds Smartly's AI-driven creative and media tools directly into that layer, spanning paid social, connected television and Google. The pilot that preceded the full rollout used server-to-server integration with Google Analytics, which the companies say contributed to the ROAS gains recorded on one client account.

Predictive Budget Allocation, the specific Smartly capability credited with the 29 percent ROAS increase, functions as an automated reallocation mechanism that shifts spend toward better-performing channels and audiences as campaign data accumulates. The companies did not disclose the client's name, industry, campaign duration, or baseline spend level in the materials reviewed, so the percentage gains describe a single account's outcome rather than an average across the client roster.

A structured pilot, then a broader rollout

According to the companies, the arrangement moved through a defined sequence: a pilot across a range of client accounts, followed by validation of both the technology and the working relationship, and only then an expansion to what the release describes as a full-scale rollout. That sequencing matters for readers evaluating the claims, since it indicates the reported metrics stem from live client work rather than a controlled benchmark test designed solely to produce favorable numbers. Still, the absence of a stated sample size or time window means the 29 percent and 26 percent figures should be read as pilot-account results, not as a portfolio-wide average.

Why this matters beyond one agency

The stated motivation behind the partnership rests on a measurement gap rather than a technology gap. Wpromote x Giant Spoon's own research, conducted with MMA Global, found that 82 percent of marketers are not confident they can measure brand impact. According to the companies, Smartly's role is to close the distance between consumer insight, creative and the right audience at the right moment, framing the partnership as an accountability mechanism rather than a purely operational efficiency play.

Andrea Bendzick, CEO of Wpromote x Giant Spoon, addressed that framing directly. "The most valuable thing we can do for a client is help them get from insight to impact with confidence," Bendzick said, adding that the partnership "means understanding what consumers feel about a brand at every stage of the journey, connecting insights to creative and media strategy at the speed the market demands, and making sure great ideas come to life at every touchpoint with the level of accountability the CFO requires." She said the arrangement with Smartly "frees our teams to focus on the big thinking that drives growth, while giving clients confidence in every dollar they spend."

Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly, framed the deal in terms of how agencies are choosing to operate rather than how many technology vendors they work with. "The agencies winning in this environment aren't the ones with the most adtech partnerships. They're the ones who've made a decision about how they want to operate," Desmond said. She characterized Wpromote x Giant Spoon's choice as reflecting "a shared belief that brands need greater speed, stronger performance, and a more connected approach to creative and media."

Whether that broader industry framing holds up matters for the marketing community that reads coverage of agency and ad tech partnerships closely. Anyone evaluating the announcement should weigh two things separately: the specific, single-client pilot numbers, which are concrete and attributable to a named tool, and the broader industry narrative about agency operating models, which is a stated position rather than an independently measured outcome. Both appear in the same release, but they carry different evidentiary weight.

The certification track and what it signals

As part of the expanded relationship, Wpromote x Giant Spoon teams are working toward full Smartly certification and Smartly Badged Agency status. That detail, while modest on its own, indicates the partnership is structured as an ongoing operational relationship rather than a one-time technology licensing deal. Agencies pursuing vendor-specific certification programs typically commit staff training hours and workflow standardization to the badge, which suggests both companies expect the integration to persist across future client work rather than functioning as a pilot that concludes once the announcement cycle ends.

Context: a busy week for Smartly

The June 18 announcement did not arrive in isolation. One day earlier, on June 17, 2026, Smartly disclosed a direct API integration with Roku's advertising platform, connecting its ad management system to Roku Ads Manager so performance marketers could launch and measure connected television campaigns using the same workflows they already use for social advertising. That integration included AI Studio, a suite for converting vertical social video assets into streaming-ready formats, alongside Creative Insights and Creative Predictive Potential, tools first introduced in November 2025.

The Roku deal is relevant context for the Wpromote x Giant Spoon partnership because it demonstrates the same underlying pattern: Smartly embedding its activation and measurement layer into a partner's existing workflow rather than asking marketers to adopt an entirely separate platform. In the Roku case, the partner was a media owner. In the Wpromote x Giant Spoon case, the partner is an agency, and the embedded layer sits inside Polaris IQ specifically.

Smartly's broader measurement ambitions also help explain why an 82 percent marketer-confidence gap in brand measurement matters to the company commercially. On March 16, 2026, Smartly signed a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based measurement company that uses causal inference to quantify the incremental value of advertising spend without relying on user-level tracking. That deal, which had not closed as of the acquisition announcement, was framed at the time as an effort to connect always-on measurement signals directly into Smartly's planning and optimization workflows. Read alongside the Wpromote x Giant Spoon partnership, the INCRMNTAL pursuit suggests Smartly has been building toward a broader measurement narrative for several months, one in which the marketer confidence gap cited in the Wpromote research becomes a commercial argument for consolidating creative, media and measurement functions under a single platform layer.

The measurement confidence problem in wider context

The 82 percent figure cited by Wpromote x Giant Spoon does not stand alone in the industry's data. A whitepaper released on October 2, 2025, by TransUnion and MMA Global, titled "Giving Marketing the Credit it Deserves," found that traditional measurement tools may undervalue brand marketing's contribution to sales by as much as 83 percent, based on case studies involving Ally Bank, Kroger and Campbell's tracked over nine to ten months. Ally Bank's conventional measurement captured only 56 percent of total marketing impact on account openings; Kroger's captured just 17 percent of the full effect on online sales; Campbell's captured 40 percent.

That research, while conducted by different organizations and using a different methodology than the survey behind the Wpromote figure, points in the same direction: marketers across the industry report persistent difficulty connecting brand-level marketing activity to measurable business outcomes, whether the obstacle is described as a confidence gap or a quantifiable undercounting of impact. Placed side by side, the two data points suggest the problem Wpromote x Giant Spoon is citing as justification for its Smartly partnership reflects a broader, multi-year pattern rather than an isolated finding specific to this one survey.

What the numbers do not show

Several details common to vendor and agency partnership announcements are absent from the materials reviewed for this article. The client behind the 29 percent ROAS increase and 26 percent spend reduction is not named, nor is the campaign category, geography, or duration specified beyond the general reference to lower-funnel results. The 93 percent reporting-time reduction is described as a maximum figure, meaning it may represent the best-case account within the pilot rather than a typical result. No comparison group or control methodology is described, so readers cannot determine whether the reported ROAS gains reflect the Predictive Budget Allocation tool in isolation or a combination of factors introduced during the pilot period, including the underlying Google Analytics server-to-server integration mentioned alongside it.

These gaps do not mean the figures are inaccurate. They mean the figures describe a single, unnamed account's outcome under conditions that were not fully disclosed, which is a common limitation across vendor-sourced case studies in the advertising technology sector generally.

Timeline

  • October 2, 2025 - TransUnion and MMA Global release a whitepaper finding traditional measurement tools may undervalue brand marketing's sales contribution by as much as 83 percent.
  • March 16, 2026 - Smartly signs a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based incrementality measurement platform.
  • June 17, 2026 - Smartly announces a direct API integration with Roku's advertising platform, enabling CTV campaign management through existing social workflows.
  • June 18, 2026 - Wpromote x Giant Spoon and Smartly announce their partnership, embedding Smartly's creative and media activation tools into the agency's Polaris IQ operating system.

Summary

Who: Wpromote x Giant Spoon, an independent full-funnel marketing agency, and Smartly, the AI-powered advertising technology platform that manages more than 7 billion dollars in ad spend for over 800 brands.

What: A partnership embedding Smartly's AI-powered creative and media activation capabilities into the activation layer of Polaris IQ, Wpromote x Giant Spoon's operating system for converting consumer insight into campaign execution, spanning paid social, connected television and Google.

When: The partnership was announced on June 18, 2026, one day after Smartly's separate integration with Roku's advertising platform.

Where: The announcement was made from New York, where Wpromote x Giant Spoon and Smartly both maintain operations.

Why: The companies cite a measurement confidence gap as the underlying motivation: research Wpromote x Giant Spoon conducted with MMA Global found that 82 percent of marketers are not confident they can measure brand impact. A structured pilot preceding the full rollout showed one client achieved a 29 percent increase in lower-funnel ROAS on 26 percent less spend, alongside a reduction in manual reporting time of as much as 93 percent.