Smartly today announced a direct integration with Roku's advertising platform, connecting its AI-powered ad management system to the Roku Ads Manager via the Roku Ads API. The arrangement allows performance marketers to set up, optimize, and measure connected television campaigns inside the same workflows they already use for social advertising - without building a separate operational structure for CTV.

What the integration does

The technical core of the partnership is an API connection between Smartly's platform and Roku Ads Manager, Roku's self-service advertising interface aimed at performance-focused advertisers and small to mid-sized businesses. According to Roku, the link means marketers can activate streaming campaigns on Roku directly from within Smartly's environment, covering campaign creation, budget management, and performance measurement in a single place.

This matters in practice because CTV campaigns have historically required separate tooling, separate reporting pulls, and often separate teams. The Roku Ads Manager, launched in September 2024, was itself designed to lower that barrier - offering direct access to premium Roku inventory without third-party fees and built-in AI tools for creative upscaling and video production. The Smartly integration extends that logic further by removing the need to log into Roku Ads Manager at all for day-to-day campaign operations.

According to Roku, the Roku Home Screen reaches more than 125 million people in the United States every day. More than half of Roku streaming households use the platform 25 days per month, according to Roku internal data from Q1 2026. Roku's most recent quarterly results showed that the number of advertisers using Ads Manager more than doubled year over year in Q1 2026.

Creative conversion from social to streaming

One of the most specific technical capabilities Smartly brings to the partnership is a set of tools for converting existing social video assets into formats ready for streaming television. According to Roku, vertical social video can be adapted into streaming ads using a suite Smartly calls AI Studio.

AI Studio covers image enhancement, scene generation, copy creation, and video production, all within a single workspace. The idea is to remove the creative rework bottleneck that has historically prevented social advertising teams from activating CTV inventory quickly. According to Smartly, research it published with EMARKETER in July 2025found that 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify creative assets across social and CTV, while only 25% tailor creative for both channels. That gap reflects workflow friction as much as creative strategy, and the Smartly toolset is directly aimed at closing it.

Beyond AI Studio, Smartly is making three other creative capabilities available for Roku campaigns. Creative Insightsanalyzes patterns across visuals, messaging, formats, and branding to identify what has driven performance. These tools were first introduced in November 2025 across social and Google channels. Creative Predictive Potential extends that logic to pre-launch, estimating how a creative is likely to perform before any spend is committed - a mechanism designed to reduce wasted budget on lower-performing variants. Finally, video and image templates allow production teams to generate high volumes of on-brand assets from reusable, customisable structures across formats and channels.

Audience reach and scale

The partnership arrives against a backdrop of intensifying competition for growth marketers' attention. Social and short-form video environments have grown more expensive and more competitive over the past two years. CTV offers a different environment - premium, brand-safe, and with high attention - alongside a distinct audience segment.

Cord-cutters and streaming-only households are not reachable through traditional linear television, and are increasingly difficult to reach through social platforms as well. According to Roku, its platform can serve this population while also contributing to funnel activity earlier, aimed at accelerating conversions downstream on search and social.

The scale behind Roku's claim is substantial. Roku accounted for 44% of total U.S. CTV viewing time by OS brand as of Q4 2025, according to data cited in recent coverage of Roku's market position. That makes it the largest single connected television operating system in the country by viewing share. The authenticated identity layer underpinning Roku's advertising - built on account-level data across 100 million-plus streaming households - gives advertisers access to a deterministic targeting signal that probabilistic methods cannot replicate.

Performance claims and measurement architecture

Smartly cites PwC-validated figures of 5.5x return on ad spend and 42 minutes saved per hour of campaign management work, a figure referenced in Forrester's Q4 2024 Creative Advertising Technologies Wave. Whether those metrics translate directly to CTV campaigns is not specified in the announcement materials.

What is specified is the measurement architecture. According to Roku, consolidated reporting within Smartly means campaign results from Roku do not require a separate dashboard. Combined with Roku Ads Manager's outcome-focused infrastructure - which Roku has extended via an iSpot integration for outcome-based optimization - the result is intended to provide a continuous view of how streaming campaigns perform relative to social.

Four specific performance tools are available within the partnership. Brand Pulse identifies true audience reach by eliminating duplication across channels and flagging frequency saturation - a problem that becomes acute when running simultaneous social and CTV campaigns against similar audiences. Dynamic Product Ads automatically generate personalized product creative using live catalog data, matching inventory to audience. Optimization Triggers allow campaign actions to fire automatically based on performance thresholds, budget conditions, timing, or custom business rules. Predictive Budget Allocation uses AI to distribute budget toward the campaigns and audiences statistically most likely to produce results.

These are not new Smartly capabilities. They have existed across the company's social integrations. Their extension to Roku represents the same platform logic applied to a new inventory source.

Context within Smartly's CTV expansion

Today's announcement is the latest step in a multi-platform CTV push Smartly has been executing since mid-2025. In March 2026, Smartly integrated with Amazon DSP, connecting its creative tools and campaign management interface to Prime Video, Twitch, Hulu, Peacock, HBO Max, and Paramount+ inventory through Amazon's supply relationships. That integration similarly prioritised bringing existing social creative to CTV environments with minimal workflow change.

Before that, Smartly integrated with Spotify Ads Manager in September 2025, extending its cross-channel management to audio and video on Spotify. The Roku partnership completes what is now a fairly broad coverage of non-social channels - audio, streaming audio, and multiple CTV supply sources - all accessible from within Smartly's unified interface.

Separately, Smartly signed a letter of intent in March 2026 to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based measurement company using causal AI and reinforcement learning to quantify the incremental value of advertising spend without user-level data or tracking. That deal has not yet closed. If completed, it would embed always-on incrementality testing directly into Smartly's platform - a capability that would make cross-channel measurement across social and CTV significantly more rigorous.

Roku was itself cited as a partner by INCRMNTAL in Q4 2025 earnings disclosures, alongside iSpot and AppsFlyer, indicating that the two companies already had a working commercial relationship before today's Smartly announcement.

What it means for performance marketers

For performance marketers - the audience Smartly and Roku are both explicitly targeting - the partnership addresses an operational bottleneck rather than a strategic one. The case for CTV as an advertising channel is not contested. PPC Land has tracked the industry's shift toward CTV as a performance medium over the past two years, noting that the historical barrier has been workflow friction and creative adaptation, not audience scale or measurement availability.

What has been missing is an easy path from a social advertising team's existing toolkit to a live CTV campaign - one that does not require hiring a separate CTV specialist, negotiating a separate insertion order, or building a new reporting integration. The Smartly-Roku API integration is an attempt to eliminate those intermediate steps. Advertisers already running on Smartly can add Roku inventory to their existing campaign setup without changing how they work.

According to Frances Callaghan, Head of Product Commercialization at Roku, the company announced the Smartly partnership on June 17, 2026. The timing places it within a broader period of Roku commercial activity. Roku reported $1.25 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, with ad spend through demand-side platforms growing 40% year over year. The Ads Manager advertiser count more than doubled year over year in the same quarter.

"Advertisers want streaming to work as hard as their best-performing channels," said Patrick Harris, SVP, Global Advertising Sales and Partnerships at Roku. "This partnership with Smartly makes it simple for brands to bring the speed and precision of social into TV, enabling them to turn proven strategies into measurable growth on the biggest screen."

"CTV's performance era is here," said Laura Desmond, CEO of Smartly. "The best advertising follows attention across every screen, and streaming is where we can now finally unlock the same proven results. Partnering with Roku brings the same rigor, scale, and incrementality advertisers have built on social to the biggest screen in the home."

The partnership gives Roku a distribution channel into the broader performance marketing community that uses Smartly's platform - a population of advertisers that includes more than 800 brands managing over $7 billion in global ad spend. For Smartly, it adds Roku's authenticated streaming inventory to a supply portfolio that now spans Meta, Google, Amazon DSP, Spotify, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, and TikTok. Roku's profitability milestone and strong Q4 2025 platform revenue - $1.22 billion in the final quarter of 2025 - underlines that the platform is now a stable commercial counterpart for a long-term integration.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Smartly, a New York-based AI advertising platform managing over $7 billion in global ad spend for more than 800 brands, and Roku, the largest connected television operating system in the United States by viewing share, with 125 million daily Home Screen users.

What: Smartly has integrated its advertising platform with Roku Ads Manager via the Roku Ads API, enabling performance marketers to launch, manage, optimize, and measure CTV campaigns on Roku directly from within Smartly's existing social advertising workflows. The integration includes AI Studio for creative conversion, Creative Insights, Creative Predictive Potential, Dynamic Product Ads, Brand Pulse audience deduplication, Optimization Triggers, and Predictive Budget Allocation.

When: The partnership was announced on June 17, 2026.

Where: The integration operates through the Roku Ads Manager API and is available to Smartly's global advertiser base. Roku's audience is concentrated in the United States, where its Home Screen reaches more than 125 million people daily.

Why: Performance marketers operating primarily in social and search advertising have lacked a low-friction path to CTV activation. The creative adaptation gap - documented in Smartly and EMARKETER research showing 72% of marketers simply repurpose social assets for CTV rather than building tailored creative - and the operational overhead of managing a separate CTV platform have been the primary barriers. The integration removes both barriers by extending Smartly's social campaign workflow to cover Roku's streaming inventory, with consolidated reporting and AI-assisted creative conversion included.