Smartly bets on Mexico City to power its global AI ad tech push
Smartly opens a Mexico City hub for product, engineering, and commercial teams, targeting AI campaign orchestration, CTV, and Creative Ad Tech for 800+ brands.
AI
Smartly today announced the opening of a new Product, Engineering and Commercial Hub in Mexico City, formalising the AI-powered advertising technology company's commitment to Latin America and North America as key growth corridors. Operations began immediately on March 10, 2026, the company confirmed in a media alert distributed from New York.
The move positions Mexico City alongside a network of 17 regional offices that already includes New York, London, Singapore, and Helsinki, where Smartly keeps its global headquarters. According to the announcement, the new hub will support Smartly's global product and engineering organisation while accelerating development across three specific capability areas: Creative Ad Tech, Connected TV (CTV), and AI campaign orchestration.
The company is actively hiring in Mexico City for engineering, artificial intelligence, and commercial roles, according to the media alert. No headcount figure was disclosed.
Why Mexico City, and why now
The timing of the announcement reflects a string of strategic moves Smartly has made over the past twelve months to build out its technical and commercial capabilities. In October 2025, the company appointed three senior executives simultaneously - Maxwell Tang as Chief Product Officer, Melissa Yang as SVP of Ecosystems & AI Applications, and Julie Green as SVP of Global Customer Success - each drawn from major platforms including Etsy, TikTok, Netflix, Amazon, and Meta. That leadership restructuring pointed clearly toward accelerated product development and ecosystem expansion.
Then in November 2025, Smartly introduced Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, two AI-powered creative intelligence products that use computer vision and eye-tracking models to evaluate attention patterns before campaigns launch. The tools extended Smartly's intelligence layer to social, Google, programmatic, and CTV channels. Just weeks earlier, the company had released its seventh annual Digital Trends Report, which found that 92% of the 450 marketers surveyed said AI was fundamentally redefining how they connect with consumers.
Most recently, on March 2, 2026 - just eight days before today's announcement - Smartly announced an integration with Amazon DSP to extend AI-powered creative optimisation to Prime Video, Fire TV, and third-party publisher inventory. That integration is available globally from launch, with additional features scheduled for later in 2026. The Mexico City hub is, in that context, less a standalone decision and more the operational infrastructure needed to sustain that pace of development.
According to Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly, the hub serves a dual purpose: "We are expanding our product presence with a new Mexico City hub to strengthen our global execution, expand access to world-class talent, and position us to lead in AI-driven marketing innovation and next-generation advertising technologies."
Desmond also framed the investment as tied directly to customer momentum: "Smartly is growing alongside our customers, and we are investing to match that momentum. We know our ambition across Creative, CTV and AI requires intentional investment in how and where we build."
The scale of Smartly's current platform
Before any Mexico City hiring begins in earnest, Smartly's platform already carries significant weight. According to the company, it supports more than 800 brands and manages over $7 billion in advertising spend globally. That figure represents an increase from the $6 billion cited in announcements throughout mid-2025, including the September 2025 Spotify Ads Manager integration and the June 2025 Reddit integration, suggesting managed spend has grown roughly 16% over that period.
Strategic partnerships span Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok. PwC-validated platform results, cited in multiple Smartly announcements, include a 5.5x return on ad spend and 42 minutes saved per hour of campaign management work. The company has also been ranked as a leader in the Forrester Wave evaluation for Creative Advertising Technologies, a third-party ranking that carries weight in enterprise software purchasing decisions.
The platform unifies creative production, media activation, and performance optimisation within a single workflow. Clients currently generate more than 150 million creative variants monthly through Smartly's automated tools - a figure that underlines both the scale of demand and the computational weight the company's engineering teams need to sustain.
Three technical priorities for the new hub
The announcement identified three capability areas that the Mexico City hub will directly support. Each maps onto a specific technical challenge Smartly has been working to address at the platform level.
Creative Ad Tech has been the company's foundation since its origins. Smartly's creative automation tools allow advertisers to produce image and video assets at scale using AI-powered templates and modular editing systems. The November 2025 launch of Creative Predictive Potential added a pre-flight layer, using computer vision to evaluate visual attention patterns and predict which creative elements will engage viewers before media spend begins. Creative Insights, the post-flight counterpart, applies AI Theme Analysis and AI Summaries to identify why specific advertisements performed - surfacing patterns across creative elements rather than simply reporting metrics.
Research Smartly published with EMARKETER in July 2025 found that 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify creative assets across platforms, while just 25% tailor creative for both social and CTV campaigns. That creative adaptation gap is precisely the problem Smartly's toolset is designed to close. Faster development cycles out of Mexico City could accelerate the roadmap for bringing those capabilities to more formats and markets.
Connected TV has become an increasingly central part of Smartly's commercial pitch. The Amazon DSP integration, announced March 2, 2026, gave the company access to Prime Video, Twitch, Hulu, Peacock, HBO Max, and Paramount+ inventory through Amazon's supply relationships. Amazon's advertising revenue reached $21.3 billion in Q4 2025, with Prime Video now reaching 315 million viewers globally - numbers that illustrate the scale of the inventory Smartly is now touching. According to the announcement for that integration, nearly 70% of marketers plan to increase streaming budgets over the next year, yet creative production bottlenecks remain the single most commonly cited barrier to activating CTV campaigns at scale.
Latin America is itself an expanding CTV market. AudienceProject launched cross-media measurement services in Mexico in September 2025, citing growing demand from Mexican advertisers for independent measurement across traditional TV, CTV, online video, and social media simultaneously. OpenX introduced curated CTV video packages for Latin American advertisers in October 2025, targeting Mexico and Brazil specifically. Smartly's Mexico City presence, then, lands at a moment when the local CTV advertising infrastructure is itself being built out.
AI campaign orchestration is the most technically complex of the three priorities. It refers to the coordination of AI-driven decisions across creative generation, media buying, budget allocation, and measurement - not just within a single channel, but simultaneously across social, audio, programmatic, and CTV. This is the layer where Smartly's value proposition most directly competes with platform-native tools from Meta, Google, and Amazon. Having product and engineering talent in Mexico City, where the company can access what it described as "world-class talent," addresses a capability-building challenge that is inherently human capital-intensive.
The Latin America and North America commercial dimension
The Mexico City hub carries an explicit commercial function, not just a product and engineering one. According to the announcement, it is designed to serve enterprise customers across North America and Latin America, with "localized expertise" and "strategic guidance" cited as priorities alongside technical innovation.
This matters because advertising technology platform adoption in Latin America has historically lagged behind North American and European markets in enterprise penetration, even as media spending in the region has grown. Major ad tech players have been moving to close that gap. Teads expanded CTV solutions into 12 new Latin American markets in March 2024, building on earlier launches in Brazil and Mexico. Disney extended its Magnite ad tech partnership to include Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina in October 2024. Each of these moves reflects a common assessment: the region represents under-tapped demand, and presence matters for winning it.
For Smartly, a commercial hub in Mexico City creates the possibility of proximity selling - building relationships with enterprise advertisers and agencies in-market rather than managing them remotely from New York or Helsinki. Whether that translates into measurable new revenue will depend on hiring pace and go-to-market execution, neither of which the company disclosed details about today.
What the hub means for Smartly's global footprint
Before today, Smartly operated across 25 countries with 17 regional offices. Mexico City becomes the eighteenth. The company's geographic spread reflects both the global nature of its largest clients - Fortune 500 companies running campaigns across multiple markets simultaneously - and the reality that advertising technology platforms need regional presence to compete for enterprise deals at scale.
The Helsinki headquarters anchors the company's European identity, a legacy of its Finnish origins. Smartly.io sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners years ago in a deal that provided €200 million in investment to accelerate growth through acquisition and organic investment. New York serves as the primary North American commercial base. Singapore anchors Asia-Pacific coverage. Mexico City now fills a gap in the Western Hemisphere's southern half, completing a structure that can credibly claim round-the-clock product and engineering coverage.
The decision also carries a talent dimension. Mexico City has developed a substantial technology and engineering community, with lower labour cost structures than comparable talent pools in San Francisco, New York, or London. For a company managing over $7 billion in ad spend and generating 150 million creative variants monthly, the ability to scale engineering capacity without proportionally scaling cost is a structural advantage. Smartly was named one of the Best Places to Work in 2026 by Built In, a designation that may help with recruiting in a competitive market.
Context for the marketing community
For marketing professionals and media buyers, today's announcement carries several practical implications. A larger and more geographically distributed product and engineering team generally means faster feature development and more responsive platform support - though that depends on execution quality, not just headcount.
The three capability areas named - Creative Ad Tech, CTV, and AI orchestration - align closely with where advertising budgets are moving. Smartly's own Digital Trends Report found that nearly all platform customers ran video advertisements during 2025. Investment intentions measured in the same report showed 50% or more of marketers planning spending increases on Meta platforms, YouTube, and TikTok for 2026. CTV investment intentions followed, with 44% planning higher spending on connected television.
The company's platform is already integrated with the channels where that spend will flow: Amazon DSP for CTV, Spotify for audio, Reddit for community-driven social, alongside the major platforms via existing partnerships. Accelerating product development from Mexico City, if successful, would compress the time between when new channel integrations become commercially relevant and when Smartly can offer them as managed capabilities within its unified platform.
For Latin American advertisers and agencies specifically, the commercial hub creates an accessible point of contact that previously did not exist in-market. Enterprise advertising technology purchases are rarely made without in-person relationships, and a local commercial team changes that dynamic meaningfully.
Timeline
- 2013: Smartly.io founded in Finland
- 2014: Smartly.io becomes official Facebook Marketing Partner
- 2019: Over €2.5 billion in ad spend flows through Smartly.io platform annually; Providence Equity Partners invests €200 million for majority stake - PPC Land coverage
- March 2022: Smartly.io launches Budget Pacing Visualizer, Dynamic Local Inventory Ads, and Pinterest Cross-Campaign Budget Optimisation - PPC Land coverage
- August 2024: Smartly's flagship ADVANCE event held at Skylight at Essex Crossing, New York City - PPC Land coverage
- March 2025 - April 2025: Smartly and EMARKETER survey 220 marketers on cross-channel video advertising approaches
- June 30, 2025: Reddit launches full Smartly integration for automated campaign management, generally available to all eligible advertisers - PPC Land coverage
- July 9, 2025: Smartly and EMARKETER publish findings showing 72% of marketers reuse creative assets across platforms - PPC Land coverage
- September 3, 2025: Smartly announces integration with Spotify Ads Manager for cross-channel audio, display, and video campaigns - PPC Land coverage
- September 22, 2025: AudienceProject launches cross-media measurement in Mexico, the company's first Latin American market - PPC Land coverage
- October 1, 2025: Smartly appoints Maxwell Tang, Melissa Yang, and Julie Green to senior leadership positions - PPC Land coverage
- October 30, 2025: OpenX introduces curated CTV and video deal packages for Latin American advertisers - PPC Land coverage
- November 5, 2025: Smartly releases seventh annual Digital Trends Report; 92% of 450 surveyed marketers say AI transforms customer engagement - PPC Land coverage
- November 18, 2025: Smartly announces Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, two AI-powered creative intelligence products - PPC Land coverage
- March 2, 2026: Smartly announces Amazon DSP integration for AI-powered CTV creative optimisation across Prime Video, Fire TV, and third-party inventory - PPC Land coverage
- March 10, 2026: Smartly opens Product, Engineering and Commercial Hub in Mexico City; operations begin immediately
Summary
Who: Smartly, an AI-powered advertising technology platform headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, with its primary North American commercial base in New York. The company supports more than 800 brands and manages over $7 billion in advertising spend globally, maintaining strategic partnerships with Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok. CEO Laura Desmond made the announcement.
What: The opening of a new Product, Engineering and Commercial Hub in Mexico City - Smartly's eighteenth regional office and its first location in Latin America. The hub is focused on three technical capability areas: Creative Ad Tech, Connected TV, and AI campaign orchestration. Smartly is actively hiring in Mexico City for engineering, AI, and commercial roles, with no specific headcount targets disclosed.
When: The announcement was made on March 10, 2026. Operations began immediately upon announcement, according to the company's media alert.
Where: Mexico City, Mexico. The hub joins a global network that includes offices in New York, London, Singapore, and Smartly's global headquarters in Helsinki. The company operates across 25 countries in total.
Why: Smartly cited continued growth across North America and Latin America, the need to accelerate product development cycles, access to talent for its expanding AI and CTV ambitions, and the strategic requirement to serve enterprise customers in the region with localised expertise. The timing follows a sustained period of platform expansion - including integrations with Spotify, Reddit, and Amazon DSP - that has increased both the company's managed ad spend and the complexity of its platform, placing greater demands on its product and engineering organisation.