By Smartly signed a letter of intent on March 17 to acquire INCRMNTAL, a Tel Aviv-based incrementality measurement company founded in 2019. The deal price wasn't disclosed. All 25 of INCRMNTAL's employees, including co-founders Maor Sadra and Moti Tal, will join Smartly's 900-person headcount when the transaction closes in the coming weeks.
On paper, this is a mid-size ad tech acquisition. In practice, it tells you where measurement is heading, and it is not toward another dashboard.
What INCRMNTAL actually does
INCRMNTAL's core product runs what it calls "always-on" incrementality. Traditional incrementality testing requires holdout groups, paused campaigns, and planned experiments. You carve out a chunk of your audience, deny them ads, wait, then compare. It works, but it is slow, expensive, and most teams run these tests quarterly at best.
INCRMNTAL skips that. Its models analyze natural fluctuations in campaign activity, things like budget changes, creative swaps, dayparting shifts, and infer causal lift from those variations in near real time. The methodology uses reinforcement learning and causal AI rather than formal experimental design.
The trade-off is obvious: you lose the statistical rigor of a controlled experiment. What you gain is continuous signal instead of periodic snapshots. For teams running campaigns across a dozen platforms simultaneously, that trade-off increasingly makes sense.
Why Smartly wants it inside the platform
Smartly started in 2013 as a Facebook ads optimization tool. It now describes itself as an AI-powered creative and media orchestration platform, running over 330 billion creative assets per year across social, CTV, and commerce channels. More than half of that creative is video, a format that got a boost when Smartly acquired Ad-Lib.io in 2022 for its creative management capabilities.
The INCRMNTAL acquisition is a different kind of play. Smartly CEO Laura Desmond told AdExchanger that the goal is to feed INCRMNTAL's incrementality signals directly into Smartly's optimization tools. That means using lift estimates to decide when to pause underperforming creative, shift budget between channels, or narrow audience targeting down to local markets.
"Measurement is moving from getting an understanding of what's already happened to becoming real time and predictive about what will happen in the future," Desmond said.
This is the interesting part. Measurement vendors have historically lived in their own lane: you run the campaign, then you measure it. The results inform your next campaign. That feedback loop can take days or weeks. Smartly is trying to collapse it into the execution layer itself, where incrementality data triggers automated decisions mid-flight.
The signal problem keeps getting worse
The timing here matters. Attribution is getting harder on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Google's AI Overviews are eating into search click volume. ChatGPT and Gemini are becoming discovery channels where traditional tracking pixels never fire. Zero-click results mean marketers are paying for impressions that generate brand awareness but produce no measurable click to attribute. Last-click attribution, which everyone knows is broken but nobody has fully abandoned, loses more credibility every quarter.
Desmond acknowledged this directly: "With the disruption of AI and with so many people now searching via ChatGPT or Gemini, it's becoming harder for more traditional measurement solutions to keep pace with the real-time nature of how customers are learning about brands and making decisions."
She also positioned INCRMNTAL as a complement to MMM and MTA, not a replacement. "This isn't an incrementality versus MMM or MTA story," she said. "But marketers do need real-time incremental information in order to make the shifts that are needed to stay relevant."
That framing is smart politically, even if the long-term trajectory suggests otherwise. If incrementality measurement lives inside the platform where you activate media, and it updates continuously, the quarterly MMM refresh starts to look like a very expensive second opinion.
What this means for your Monday morning
If you run campaigns on Smartly, the near-term impact is straightforward: you will eventually get incrementality signals baked into the same interface where you manage creative and budgets. The promise is fewer tabs, faster decisions, and optimization that accounts for causal lift rather than just platform-reported conversions.
If you don't use Smartly, watch for the second-order effects. This acquisition accelerates a pattern where ad platforms absorb measurement functionality that used to be the domain of independent vendors. Meta already offers conversion lift studies. Google has its own incrementality tools inside Ads. Smartly embedding INCRMNTAL puts a demand-side platform in the same position.
The risk, as always with platform-integrated measurement, is that the entity optimizing your spend is also the one grading the homework. Independent measurement still has a role precisely because it sits outside the optimization loop. INCRMNTAL's methodology is interesting, but its independence disappears the moment the acquisition closes.
For measurement teams evaluating their stack: this deal confirms that always-on incrementality is moving from "nice to have" to table stakes. If your current setup still relies on quarterly lift tests and last-click attribution as your primary signals, the gap between what you are measuring and what is actually driving results is widening faster than you think.
Desmond put it simply: "Marketers want to know what's working, when it's working and whether any of that is leading to an incremental purchase."
Last click is still hanging on. But the platforms are building around it, not with it.
Devon Park covers measurement and privacy for The Daily Vibe.
