As the industry continues to see a growing demand for solutions that bring creative and media closer together across all channels, Ad-Lib.io and Smartly.io have officially joined forces and will be further expanding their ad-tech capabilities.
Smartly.io, the leading social advertising SaaS platform for creative and performance marketers, and Ad-Lib.io, the next-generation creative optimisation platform, announced the acquisition earlier this month. Both entities share the same vision and values and are thrilled to be coming together to provide clients with a powerful solution to facilitate marketing campaigns.
Helsinki-based Smartly.io previously focused primarily on paid social media advertising on the Meta Platforms Inc. properties, Facebook and Instagram, along with Pinterest, TikTok and Snapchat. Its technology is designed in part to help brands understand what creative elements resonate best with various audiences and to automatically produce some of those creative assets. It also seeks to help brands deliver an ad to certain audiences at a time and on a platform where it can be most effective.
Continuing its strong growth trajectory, the acquisition advances Smartly.io’s cross-channel reach from social to now include dynamic creative optimisation across programmatic, CTV and the entire Google ecosystem.
Ad-Lib.io is a Google Certified Creative Partner that provides the leading next-generation creative optimisation platform for marketers at the world’s largest brands. We connect creative and media workflows using intelligent automation, making it easy and fast to produce and optimise relevant ad creative across all digital channels. These ads are 60 per cent more cost-efficient to produce, according to Ad-Lib.io’s customers, which include 10 of the top 30 global brands.
With the acquisition, Smartly.io’s SaaS solution for social advertising will now be augmented by Ad-Lib.io’s enterprise suite of creative tools for YouTube, DV360 and Google Ads campaigns. The industry is seeing a growing demand for solutions that bring creative and media closer together across all channels.
“The past two years have proven that creative technology has become the most important lever for driving digital advertising performance,” said Kristo Ovaska, CEO and co-founder, Smartly.io. “Ad-Lib.io is a clear leader in the creative space by innovating on the mission-critical dimensions of workflow, automation, brand governance, personalization and insight. Their knowledge of the Google stack is unmatched in the industry, and combining that with Smartly.io’s deep understanding of Facebook and the social stack across creative, media and data allows us to now serve customers across all major digital channels.”
“Smartly.io is the preeminent leader in delivering creative and media effectiveness for social,” said Oli Marlow-Thomas, founder and president, Ad-Lib.io. “With brand marketers and agencies increasingly uniting their social and programmatic teams into integrated digital creative and media investment teams, this is a natural next step for both companies.”
Ad-Lib.io CEO Adit Abhyankar added, “These teams are currently using multiple technologies or software partners, but going forward they won’t have to. The Smartly.io and Ad-Lib.io solution will provide the connective tissue to maximise creative effectiveness, media buying and creative intelligence.”
Smartly.io and Ad-Lib.io customers are excited about the benefits of this combination:
Dean Weaving, head of display, video and paid social for Deliveroo is a supporter of the combined entities. “Both Ad-Lib.io and Smartly.io have enabled the developing partnerships between our creative and media teams. This has massively simplified the way our teams work. And with this merger, it only gets better, as we look to unify our advertising relevance across channels.”
“Ad-Lib.io has been a fantastic partner of ours for the last four years while we have been focused on branding activity,” said Steve Pollack, head of media communication at Nestle. “This partnership will help Nestle extend to more ‘always-on’ and e-commerce-related activity. We see it as a natural fit and are excited by what the Ad-Lib.io and Smartly.io journey will mean for brands seeking relevant and consistent relationships with their customers in the digital advertising arena.”
Over the coming months, the Smartly.io and Ad-Lib.io teams will continue to build a robust stack of creative digital optimisation tools to help advertisers gain unparalleled relevance and reach in the constantly changing digital advertising landscape.
