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.
