Smartly names ex-Netflix executive Kelly Uphoff CTO

Smartly has appointed Kelly Uphoff as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in a former senior technology executive from Tala and Netflix.

Uphoff will lead the company's global engineering organisation and oversee work on its AI-focused advertising platform. Her remit includes systems designed to learn from campaign signals across creative, media, measurement and optimisation.

The appointment marks a senior leadership change at the advertising technology group as it puts greater emphasis on automated decision-making in marketing. The role will focus on developing technology that uses campaign data to inform subsequent creative and media choices.

Uphoff joins from Tala, where she served as Chief Technology Officer and led technology for the financial platform. Before that, she spent a decade at Netflix, leading data science and engineering teams working across machine learning, predictive modelling and experimentation.

Her background in personalisation and AI informed the hire as advertisers shift from using AI to generate assets to applying it across a broader set of campaign decisions, including how campaigns are created, activated, measured and adjusted.

Leadership change

Uphoff succeeds Lauri Tarkkala as Chief Technology Officer. During his tenure, Tarkkala oversaw a reworking of Smartly's technology foundation and the development of its unified platform.

That period also included the integration of acquisitions such as Ad-Lib.io, Viralspace.ai and INCRMNTAL, which expanded the company's work in creative and campaign decisioning.

Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer at Smartly, linked the appointment to wider changes in the development of advertising technology.

"Advertising is entering a fundamentally new era, where AI and intelligent systems will reshape how brands understand and respond to consumers, make decisions and turn intelligence into action," said Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer at Smartly.

Desmond also outlined the company's view of the role AI will play in its products and engineering priorities.

"Kelly understands that in an AI-native system, every signal is an opportunity to learn and make the next decision better. She brings the technical depth, AI expertise and customer orientation to help us accelerate the continuous optimization loops across creative and media, where every action generates intelligence that improves what comes next. That is how we create better experiences for people and better outcomes for marketers," Desmond said.

AI focus

Smartly's latest executive hire comes as advertising groups across the sector try to apply AI to more than content production. Many are seeking tools that can combine data analysis, experimentation and automation to decide which audiences to target, which creative treatments to use and how budgets should shift during a campaign.

In that context, technical leadership has become more central to product strategy. Companies in the adtech market are under pressure to show that AI can improve measurable campaign performance while fitting into the systems brands and agencies already use.

For Smartly, that means continuing to build around a platform model that unifies campaign functions rather than treating media buying, creative development and measurement as separate tasks. Its engineering work is increasingly focused on continuous decision intelligence across the campaign lifecycle.

Uphoff said that trend shaped her decision to join the business.

"The next chapter of advertising will require technology that can continuously learn, make better decisions and translate intelligence into experiences that are genuinely relevant to each consumer," said Kelly Uphoff, incoming Chief Technology Officer at Smartly.

She also pointed to Smartly's existing technical base and the scope for further development.

"Smartly has built a strong technology foundation and has a compelling opportunity to bring AI, data and decision-making together in ways that create meaningful value for marketers. I'm excited to join the team and help build what comes next to move advertising forward," Uphoff said.