Smartly this week announced an integration with Amazon DSP that extends its AI-powered creative optimization and campaign management to Amazon's premium connected television inventory, including Prime Video and Fire TV, as well as third-party publisher inventory. The announcement, made on March 2, 2026, at 9 a.m. EST from New York, marks a significant expansion of the advertising technology company's footprint into streaming television - a channel where budget commitments are climbing rapidly but operational complexity has historically lagged behind social advertising workflows.

According to the press release, nearly 70% of marketers plan to increase streaming budgets over the next year, yet many have struggled to apply the same performance rigor to CTV that they apply to social campaigns. The integration is available globally from launch, with additional features scheduled to roll out later in 2026.

Three core capabilities

The Smartly-Amazon DSP integration is built around three distinct technical pillars, each addressing a specific operational gap that advertisers have identified in CTV campaign management.

The first is AI-powered creative optimization. Smartly enables the extension of creative personalization from social channels into streaming environments. According to the announcement, this capability directly targets creative production bottlenecks - the single most commonly cited barrier preventing advertisers from activating CTV campaigns at scale. Using what Smartly calls AI Studio, advertisers can create Amazon-ready CTV ads and adapt assets across markets. Creative intelligence then predicts which versions are likely to perform best before a campaign launches, reducing wasted spend on low-performing variants.

The second capability is unified campaign management. Advertisers can create, manage, and optimize Amazon DSP campaigns inside the same workflow they already use for social advertising, with real-time performance visibility across channels. This is a meaningful change for teams that have historically operated social and CTV campaigns in entirely separate platforms, often with different teams, different reporting structures, and incompatible measurement frameworks.

The third pillar is cross-channel measurement. The integration enables unified reporting on incremental reach across social and CTV, and gives advertisers the ability to reallocate budgets based on performance data spanning both environments. According to the announcement, this means CTV exposure can be mapped to real outcomes including sign-ups, with the full funnel from brand awareness to conversion now traceable in a single reporting interface.

What Amazon DSP brings to the table

Amazon DSP is not a generic programmatic buying platform. Its value to advertisers rests largely on the scale and quality of its first-party data - shopping signals, streaming behavior, and browsing data from hundreds of millions of consumers that competing demand-side platforms cannot replicate.

Amazon's advertising revenue reached $21.3 billion in Q4 2025, with Prime Video now reaching 315 million viewers globally. That audience scale is central to Smartly's pitch: advertisers using the integration gain access not only to Prime Video inventory but also to Twitch, Hulu, Peacock, HBO Max, Paramount+, and others through Amazon's supply relationships.

According to the press release, Smartly currently supports more than 800 brands and manages over $7 billion in ad spend globally. The company has previously established partnerships with Amazon, Google, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, Spotify, and TikTok. It cites PwC-validated results including a 5.5x return on ad spend and 42 minutes saved per hour of campaign management work.

The integration also benefits from Amazon's broader infrastructure investments. Amazon launched Complete TV in March 2025, a capability within Amazon DSP that uses AI to deliver budget allocation recommendations across Prime Video and other streaming platforms. In June 2025, Amazon and Roku announced the largest authenticated CTV partnership in the United States, providing access to an estimated 80 million U.S. CTV households. Disney inventory became available through Amazon DSP in June 2025 via Disney's Real-Time Ad Exchange, further expanding the premium streaming supply accessible to Amazon DSP buyers.

What executives said

According to Melissa Yang, SVP of Ecosystems & AI Applications at Smartly, "As CTV matures, entertainment, commerce, and social are merging into one experience. 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."

Erin McGee, Director of Partner and Advertiser Growth Marketing at Amazon Ads, framed the partnership in terms of cross-channel efficiency. According to McGee, "Driving impactful business outcomes across channels is key for advertisers and this partnership brings CTV and social campaigns together for maximum, measurable impact. 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."

Yang was appointed SVP of Ecosystems & AI Applications at Smartly in October 2025, following a decade building partnership ecosystems at Meta and TikTok. Her arrival was one of three senior hires Smartly made simultaneously, alongside Maxwell Tang as Chief Product Officer and Julie Green as SVP of Global Customer Success - a leadership structure clearly designed to accelerate exactly this kind of platform integration.

The creative gap this addresses

The creative production bottleneck in CTV is well-documented. Research published jointly by Smartly and EMARKETER in July 2025 found that 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify existing assets across social and CTV platforms, while just 25% develop tailored creative for both channels. Yet nearly 70% of survey respondents planned to increase CTV investment in 2025 - a contradiction that points directly at the operational friction the Smartly-Amazon integration is designed to resolve.

The numbers illustrate how large the gap between ambition and execution has become. Marketers want to be in CTV. The budgets are moving in that direction. But the workflow infrastructure - particularly for creative production and adaptation - has not kept pace.

Smartly introduced Creative Predictive Potential and Creative Insights in November 2025, extending AI-powered pre-campaign prediction and post-campaign creative analysis to social, Google, programmatic, and CTV channels. The Amazon DSP integration now adds a direct pipeline from those creative intelligence capabilities into Amazon's premium streaming inventory.

Amazon's Creative Agent, also expanded in November 2025, brought agentic AI to Streaming TV and Sponsored TV formats within Amazon's own platform. The Smartly integration sits alongside - not in competition with - that native capability, giving advertisers a third-party layer of creative automation and cross-channel management on top of Amazon's first-party infrastructure.

Broader market context

CTV advertising is experiencing a structural transition. The channel built its early advertiser appeal on reach and brand safety - a premium, large-screen environment where programmatic targeting could be applied to traditional television formats. That value proposition has not disappeared, but it is now being supplemented by performance expectations more commonly associated with social advertising.

According to the announcement, more than half of global marketers are already planning to increase CTV spend. Industry projections cited by PPC Land show CTV's share of media budgets doubling from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025. That kind of structural budget shift creates pressure on CTV platforms and their technology partners to demonstrate measurable outcomes, not just audience scale.

Amazon is well-positioned to benefit from this shift. Its advertising revenue grew 22% year-over-year in Q2 2025 to $15.7 billion, outpacing the company's overall 12% sales growth. The advertising segment's expansion has been driven partly by Prime Video's shift to an ad-supported model and partly by Amazon's growing dominance in programmatic CTV through partnerships and platform investment.

For Smartly, the Amazon DSP integration fits a broader pattern of platform expansion. In September 2025, Smartly announced an integration with Spotify Ads Manager, enabling advertisers to manage audio, display, and video campaigns through its platform alongside other digital channels. Each new integration extends the company's argument that managing campaigns across social, audio, and CTV through a single platform produces better outcomes than operating those channels separately.

The Forrester Wave recognition cited in Smartly's press release - the company is ranked as a leader in Creative Advertising Technologies - provides third-party validation for its positioning. Whether that positioning translates into durable competitive advantage in the CTV space will depend on how quickly it can scale adoption of the Amazon DSP integration and whether cross-channel measurement capabilities deliver the incremental reach data advertisers are demanding.

Implications for agencies and brand teams

For agencies managing large advertising accounts, the operational benefits are specific and measurable. Running social and CTV campaigns in separate platforms typically involves separate trafficking, separate creative production pipelines, separate reporting exports, and separate budget reconciliation processes. Each step adds time, introduces discrepancies, and limits the speed at which optimization decisions can be made. Collapsing those workflows into a single interface - where a creative asset can be adapted for Prime Video and launched within the same session as a Meta campaign - removes a class of operational friction that has persisted since CTV budgets first became material.

For brand teams, the unified measurement dimension is arguably more significant than the workflow consolidation. Knowing how CTV exposure interacts with social reach - whether a viewer who saw a Prime Video ad is being efficiently re-engaged on Instagram, or whether the two channels are delivering redundant impressions to the same household - has been technically difficult and expensive to answer. According to the announcement, Smartly's integration introduces cross-channel incremental reach measurement and budget reallocation tools, suggesting that at least some of this cross-channel signal will now be available within the platform's reporting interface.

The global availability from launch also matters for multinational advertisers. Amazon DSP operates across dozens of markets, and Smartly's platform is used by Fortune 500 companies running campaigns in multiple geographies simultaneously. Constraining the integration to a single market at launch would have limited its relevance for that client segment. The decision to launch globally - with additional features to follow later in 2026 - suggests both companies are prioritizing enterprise-scale adoption.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Smartly, a New York-based advertising technology company managing over $7 billion in ad spend for more than 800 brands globally, in partnership with Amazon Ads and its demand-side platform.

What: An integration between Smartly's AI-powered advertising platform and Amazon DSP, enabling advertisers to extend social campaign creative and management workflows into Amazon's premium CTV inventory - including Prime Video and Fire TV - with unified cross-channel measurement and AI-driven creative optimization.

When: The integration was announced on March 2, 2026, at 9 a.m. EST. It is available globally from launch, with additional features rolling out later in 2026.

Where: The integration operates globally across Amazon's CTV inventory, including Prime Video, Fire TV, and third-party publisher inventory accessible through Amazon DSP. Smartly advertisers manage these campaigns from within their existing Smartly platform workflow.

Why: CTV advertising investment is growing rapidly - nearly 70% of marketers plan to increase streaming budgets - but creative production bottlenecks and fragmented workflows have prevented many advertisers from executing CTV campaigns with the same performance discipline they apply to social. The integration aims to close that gap by applying social-style AI creative automation, real-time optimization, and unified measurement to streaming TV, in an environment where Amazon's first-party data and premium inventory scale provide a distinctive targeting and measurement foundation.

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