Roku and Smartly partner to port social ad workflows to CTV
Smartly has partnered with Roku to integrate its advertising technology platform directly with Roku Ads Manager via API. The partnership enables digital marketers to run and optimize CTV campaigns on Roku using existing social media ad workflows and creative assets.
Key Takeaways
- Direct API integration links Smartly's platform with Roku Ads Manager for unified campaign execution
- Advertisers can adapt existing social video assets for TV screens without rebuilding creative from scratch
- Marketers gain access to Smartly's AI tools, including image enhancement and predictive performance scoring, for Roku inventory
- Reporting is consolidated across screens to measure incrementality and cross-channel impact through a single dashboard
Why It Matters
This integration lowers the operational barrier for performance-driven advertisers traditionally tethered to social media platforms. By enabling a 'scroll-to-screen' transition, Roku is directly courting the long-tail of digital-first marketers who have avoided CTV due to fragmented workflows or high creative production costs. For the broader industry, it signals the maturation of CTV as a performance channel that competes with social giants for active, measurable conversion budgets rather than just top-of-funnel brand spend. Watch for whether this partnership improves Roku's ad-tier fill rates as more performance budgets migrate to the big screen.
Additional Context
The partnership arrives as Roku lean-ins to its status as a programmatic-first platform, reporting that third-party programmatic DSP spend increased more than 40% year-over-year in Q1 2026, per Roku's shareholder letter. During the same period, advertising revenue grew 27% to $613 million, even as device revenue fell 16% to $118 million. This divergence underscores Roku's strategic shift toward monetization of its 100 million streaming households over hardware volume. Industry data supports the logic of the Smartly tie-up; according to PPC Land in June 2026, roughly 72% of marketers currently repurpose social assets for CTV due to high creative friction, a gap this API integration aims to close. Roku has been aggressively building out self-serve infrastructure to capture budgets from smaller direct-to-consumer brands that typically prioritize Meta or TikTok. Per NextTV, Roku Ads Manager was originally launched to provide these performance marketers with interactive formats like 'Action Ads' and Shopify integrations. Meanwhile, Smartly has been expanding its footprint across the tech stack; in March 2026, the company integrated with Amazon DSP to connect its creative tools to Prime Video and Twitch inventory, per PPC Land. These moves reflect a broader 2026 trend where CTV and social video budgets are converging, with US advertisers collectively investing over $10 billion more in social video than linear TV last year, according to Basis Technologies.
Read full article at ca.finance.yahoo.com