Smartly on June 22, 2026 introduced Smartly Synapse, an AI orchestration and memory layer designed to sit behind every AI agent on the platform, connecting campaign data, business context, and performance outcomes in a continuous loop across the company's 800-brand client base.

What is Smartly Synapse

The announcement was timed to coincide with the opening day of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which ran June 22 to 26 in Cannes, France. Cannes Lions 2026 drew a concentrated cluster of agentic AI infrastructure announcements, with Smartly joining Adobe, DoubleVerify, LiveRamp, Stagwell, and several others that shipped major product or partnership moves in the same 72-hour window.

Smartly Synapse is not a standalone product in the conventional sense. According to Smartly, it functions as the intelligence layer behind the platform's existing AI agents, which are focused on planning, execution, and optimization. Rather than operating as a separate tool that marketers interact with directly, Synapse processes inputs - company context, user behavior, market trends, pre-launch intelligence, and performance data at scale - and feeds that information to the AI agents that handle campaign work.

The architecture is organized around what Smartly calls a continuous performance loop: marketer intent, business context, campaign activity, and outcomes continuously inform one another rather than being handled in sequence by separate systems. According to Smartly, the shared intelligence and memory layer means the system learns from every campaign, feeding those learnings back into future recommendations and execution.

"Smartly Synapse is the intelligent AI orchestration and memory layer behind our AI agents. It augments Smartly's existing platform, turning campaign data, business context and user input into coordinated action," said Maxwell Tang, Chief Product Officer at Smartly. "We built Smartly Synapse for brands and agencies managing complex media budgets and fragmented workflows. Our goal is simple: help marketers reduce manual handoffs, make faster decisions and improve outcomes across channels."

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The technical architecture

The distinction Smartly is drawing is between a memory layer that persists knowledge across campaigns and a more transient processing layer that handles individual tasks. Most advertising platforms treat each campaign or optimization cycle as a largely independent event. Synapse is designed to make those events cumulative - so that a creative insight from one campaign can inform budget allocation on another, or a performance outcome on one channel can shape planning decisions across others.

According to Smartly, the system synthesizes five distinct categories of input: company context, user behavior, market trends, pre-launch intelligence, and performance data. These inputs flow to the three agent types - planning agents, execution agents, and optimization agents - giving each the context it needs to act on marketer intent without requiring manual handoffs between workflow stages.

The phrase "millions of campaign signals" appears in Smartly's description of what Synapse processes. Smartly manages over $7 billion in advertising spend globally for more than 800 brands, according to the company, a figure that represents a significant increase from the $6 billion the company cited in announcements during mid-2025. That scale gives the memory layer a substantial data foundation, though Smartly has not specified whether the learning mechanism operates across clients or is isolated to individual accounts - a distinction that would matter considerably to enterprise advertisers concerned about proprietary data.

Where Synapse fits in the platform

Smartly's platform currently unifies creative production, media activation, and performance optimization within a single workflow. Clients use it to plan, create, launch, and optimize campaigns across channels including social, commerce, and connected television. The company holds strategic partnerships with Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, Spotify, and TikTok. PwC-validated results cited in Smartly's materials include a 5.5x return on ad spend and 42 minutes saved per hour of campaign management work.

Synapse sits beneath all of that. According to Smartly, it powers the company's proprietary AI technology and strengthens the platform's ability to improve performance over time by ensuring that the AI agents have access to accumulated context rather than starting each campaign from scratch. The framing is essentially that the agents are the visible working layer, and Synapse is the substrate that makes those agents effective.

Smartly has been building toward this kind of integrated intelligence layer for some time. In November 2025, the company introduced Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, two AI-powered products using computer vision and eye-tracking models to evaluate attention patterns before campaigns launch. Those tools produced pre-campaign prediction and post-campaign analysis, generating a feedback signal that Synapse is now designed to make persistent and cross-functional.

In March 2026, Smartly integrated with Amazon DSP to extend AI-powered creative optimization to Prime Video and Fire TV. Also in March, the company signed a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based incrementality measurement platform. The INCRMNTAL deal, if completed, would bring always-on incrementality signals into Smartly's optimization workflows - the kind of measurement output that a persistent memory layer like Synapse could in principle translate directly into planning decisions.

The Horizon partnership context

Smartly's June 22 announcement of Synapse was not the only news the company made that day. The company simultaneously unveiled a partnership with Horizon Media Holdings making Smartly the first SaaS platform to bring Blu audience segments into campaign execution via the Blu Audience API. The two announcements together describe a deliberate product and partnership push timed to Cannes Lions.

The Horizon partnership is relevant to Synapse because the practical ambition behind both moves is similar: connecting intelligence that currently lives at one stage of the workflow to execution that happens at another. Blu audience segments, built from Horizon's proprietary data about consumer decision-making, flow into Smartly's campaign and creative systems via API. Synapse, in turn, is meant to ensure that the performance outcomes of those campaigns cycle back into future decisions. Early campaigns using the Blu integration reported nearly double the creative engagement compared to standard audience approaches and a 35% reduction in cost per order, according to Smartly - figures that are unverified by a third party.

Industry context at Cannes Lions 2026

The Synapse announcement arrived during a week when the advertising industry was processing a dense wave of agentic infrastructure launches. As PPC Land reported in its pre-Cannes analysis, DoubleVerify launched DV Neura - a cognitive AI engine organized around four pillars including Agentic Execution - on June 17. LiveRamp opened its data platform to third-party agent builders in the same period. WPP Media projected global advertising reaching $1.3 trillion in 2026, with AI investment cited as the primary driver.

Horizon Media had separately disclosed in the week before Cannes that it had built an agentic software layer allowing its buying agents to interact directly with agents from Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, Smartly, and others. That disclosure named Smartly explicitly as one of the agent partners in a live production deployment with SharkNinja. Synapse is the infrastructure layer that makes Smartly's side of that agent-to-agent interaction possible.

The broader pattern, tracked by PPC Land throughout the period before Cannes Lions 2026, is that the major vendors are competing to own the orchestration layer - the point at which AI agents from different systems need to coordinate rather than operate in silos. Smartly's positioning with Synapse is that its orchestration layer is internal to the platform, giving it a single coherent memory that cuts across creative, media, and performance functions without requiring external agent handoffs.

Mediaocean's bi-annual survey, published around the same period, found that AI-powered automation and cross-channel orchestration ranked in the top five capability priorities for the first time in the survey's history, with 60% of marketers planning to increase AI media spending in the second half of 2026. The barriers to scaling that AI deployment were identified as data gaps, integration problems with existing marketing stacks, talent shortages, and unclear ROI. The memory and orchestration architecture Smartly describes with Synapse is a direct response to the integration barrier.

What is not specified

Several technical details are absent from the announcement. Smartly has not described how the memory layer handles data isolation between clients - meaning it is not clear whether performance signals from one advertiser's campaigns can influence recommendations made to another. That question is not trivial for enterprise accounts. Similarly, the announcement does not specify how Synapse interacts with external agent frameworks such as the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Advertising Management Protocol (AAMP) or the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), both of which are gaining traction as interoperability standards for agentic advertising systems.

What Smartly has made explicit is the organizational problem the product is designed to solve: fragmented workflows in which campaign data, business context, and performance outcomes exist in separate systems and require manual effort to connect. According to Smartly, Synapse removes that manual connection requirement by making all of those inputs continuously available to the AI agents that handle planning, execution, and optimization.

The company is ranked as the leader in the Forrester Wave evaluation for Creative Advertising Technologies. Maxwell Tang, appointed as Chief Product Officer in October 2025 after more than ten years at Etsy, has led the product organization through the buildup of AI capabilities that Synapse now sits beneath.

Timeline

  • September 3, 2025 - Smartly integrates with Spotify Ads Manager, managing campaigns across audio, display, and video for 700+ brands and $6 billion in global ad spend.
  • October 2025 - Smartly appoints Maxwell Tang as Chief Product Officer, Melissa Yang as SVP of Ecosystems and AI Applications, and Julie Green as SVP of Global Customer Success.
  • November 5, 2025 - Smartly publishes its 2026 Digital Trends Report, based on 450 marketers across the US, UK, and Germany; 92% report AI is redefining consumer engagement.
  • November 18, 2025 - Smartly introduces Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights, using computer vision and eye-tracking models to evaluate attention patterns before campaigns launch.
  • March 2, 2026 - Smartly announces integration with Amazon DSP, extending AI-powered creative optimization to Prime Video and Fire TV.
  • March 10, 2026 - Smartly opens a product, engineering, and commercial hub in Mexico City, joining a network of 17 regional offices.
  • March 16, 2026 - Smartly signs a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based AI incrementality measurement platform.
  • June 17, 2026 - Smartly integrates with Roku Ads API, enabling performance marketers to run CTV campaigns through social advertising workflows.
  • June 22, 2026 - Smartly introduces Smartly Synapse, the AI orchestration and memory layer behind its AI agents, at Cannes Lions 2026 in New York and Cannes.
  • June 22, 2026 - Smartly simultaneously announces a partnership with Horizon Media Holdings, making Smartly the first SaaS platform to bring Blu audience segments into campaign execution via API.
  • June 22-26, 2026 - Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity runs in Cannes, France.

Summary

Who: Smartly, a New York-based AI-powered advertising technology company managing over $7 billion in global ad spend for more than 800 brands, with partnerships across Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, Spotify, and TikTok.

What: Smartly introduced Smartly Synapse, an AI orchestration and memory layer that sits behind all of the company's AI agents - covering planning, execution, and optimization - processing millions of campaign signals to create a continuous performance loop where outcomes from past campaigns inform future decisions.

When: June 22, 2026, the opening day of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Where: Announced from New York, with the product forming part of a dual announcement made at Cannes Lions in Cannes, France.

Why: Enterprise advertisers managing complex media budgets across multiple channels accumulate campaign data, business context, and performance outcomes in fragmented systems that require manual effort to connect. Smartly Synapse is designed to eliminate that manual connection requirement by making accumulated intelligence continuously available to AI agents, with the stated goal of reducing handoffs, accelerating decisions, and improving cross-channel outcomes.