Smartly Acquires INCRMNTAL to Embed Incrementality Into Campaign Optimization
The Development
Smartly has signed a letter of intent to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-founded incrementality measurement startup, with the transaction expected to close by early April 2026. All roughly 25 INCRMNTAL employees—including co-founders Maor Sadra and Moti Tal—will join Smartly, bringing its total headcount to more than 925. Financial terms were not disclosed. INCRMNTAL's platform uses causal lift modeling to measure incrementality on an always-on basis, analyzing natural fluctuations in campaign activity rather than requiring formal holdout experiments or paused campaigns. Smartly CEO Laura Desmond said the goal is to feed INCRMNTAL's signals directly into Smartly's existing optimization layer, enabling lift data to inform real-time decisions on creative swaps, budget reallocation, and audience targeting. Smartly currently processes more than 330 billion creative assets annually across social, open web, and connected TV, with video now representing more than 50% of platform creative.
Our Take
Measurement acquisitions usually get positioned as a reporting upgrade. This one is structured differently: Smartly is explicitly routing incrementality signals into activation, not dashboards. That distinction matters. When lift data informs whether a creative asset gets paused or a budget gets shifted—automatically, in near real time—incrementality stops being a post-campaign audit and becomes the optimization engine itself. That's a direct challenge to how performance marketers currently use MMM and MTA, which operate on lag. The timing is deliberate. As AI-driven discovery fragments the consumer journey and identifier-based attribution erodes further, causal measurement becomes the only methodology that doesn't depend on user-level signals. Smartly is positioning before that transition forces the issue. Competitors offering creative and media orchestration without embedded causal measurement will increasingly struggle to justify their optimization claims.
The Exploit
Action Item
If your agency or brand team uses Smartly for creative and media management, request a roadmap briefing from your account team before Q2 2026 to understand how INCRMNTAL's always-on lift signals will integrate into your existing campaign optimization workflows.