AI may have dominated DMEXCO 2025, but the real wins came from cultural nuance, creative twists, and authentic brand connection.
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DMEXCO has always been a barometer for where our industry’s heading. This year, the needle pointed firmly to AI. Everywhere I turned, there were promises: programmatic made smarter, SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) “solved,” images and videos created at scale, content pipelines humming. It felt energetic and optimistic.
And it also felt familiar: We’ve been here before with cloud, blockchain, and Industry 4.0. Big words, bigger booths, and the quiet question behind it all: what actually moves brands and customers?
The AI Hype Cycle
Walking through the halls, “something with AI” was the default setting. Many products were polished wrappers, improved prompt systems, or orchestration layers on top of existing models like OpenAI or Gemini rather than any homegrown AI/ML. That’s not per se negative, but it sets expectations that often can’t be met.
Two patterns stood out:
- SEO/GEO claims outpacing reality. GEO in particular, still lacks stable data and shared best practices. The rhetoric suggests certainty, but the evidence suggests we’re still learning. It reminds me of SEO’s long journey, where years of incremental tuning, not shortcuts, built real advantage.
- Visual generation quality all over the map. I saw everything from impressively realistic, brand-safe outputs to the usual “AI bunnies” with those overly glossy, oddly generic female figures you can spot from across the aisle. Some outputs might reach a professional, production-ready level, but it seems that consistency is not guaranteed — every result still requires critical review and refinement.
The deeper issue isn’t the tool, it’s the intent. When AI is used as a means to a clear outcome, such as better creatives, faster iteration, smarter audience insight, it earns its place.
When it becomes a feature to tick or a slogan to paste, it dilutes both product and promise. As John McCarthy, the ‘inventor’ of the term AI said: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”
But I would say we’re not there yet.
Where It Gets Interesting
In the middle of all the generic “AI-enabled” claims, one company stood out: Construktiv GmbH. Unlike many others, they don’t use AI as a self-serving label. They spin off real ventures where AI becomes a tool with a clear purpose.
Their projects range from an AI singer (Ben Gaya), to Pairson — a community where users can interact and play with different personalities — to a digital photo and film studio that lets you shoot on the moon or adapt models across diverse cultural and social backgrounds without the usual “AI smell.”
The strength here is not in proving that they “can do AI,” but in applying it with intent: reducing production costs, broadening representation, and creating new forms of creativity that would be difficult or expensive otherwise. It’s a reminder of what happens when AI serves imagination instead of hype.
What’s Still Missing
What was interesting everywhere else was how little intercultural thinking plays a role in today’s AI marketing solutions. Companies talk about markets and languages, but rarely about cultural nuance.
That gap carries real risks. Biases baked into training data remain invisible until they slip through into campaigns. Teams rely heavily on prompting to correct outputs, telling the system what not to do or nudging it toward inclusivity. But prompts are no eternal truth, models forget, and cultural depth can’t be reduced to a single instruction.
The same is true for visuals and video. Changing skin tone or clothing isn’t enough. Gestures, facial expressions, and behaviors differ across cultures.
A Refreshing Analogue Twist
Amidst all the digital noise, one idea felt refreshingly grounded: pizza boxes as marketing channels. A startup (Kartonizza) took the German saying “Love goes through your stomach” quite literally.
They came up with a concept where brands can run hyper-local campaigns by printing individual designs on pizza cartons, then distributing them through selected restaurants and delivery services in a target area.
A very clever idea to let advertisement enter your home, and have a long exposure time. It sounds almost old-fashioned compared to AI dashboards and prompt engineering, and yet it seems to work. Campaigns can be geoselected, fully trackable online, and designed to hit exactly the right audience at the right time.
One of the most creative give-aways I saw at the fair underlined this point: a good old cassette with the brand name and a QR code printed on it. Simple, nostalgic, and strikingly effective.
For me, both the analogue campaign and the cassette were reminders of what marketing is really about. Not chasing the newest buzzword, but finding creative, authentic ways to connect with people.
At its core, marketing is still about selling, building brands that stand for something, and creating resonance.
Intercultural Insights
How these brands create resonance across markets looks different for each region or country. One conversation with a Malaysian provider reminded me how profoundly culture shapes the way technology is marketed and adopted.
- Europe/Germany: Buyers want transparency and autonomy. They expect to see what a tool can do, backed by clear analytics and measurable results. The mindset is: show me the features, give me the dashboard, and I’ll manage it myself. Independence and self-reliance are part of the value.
- Asia (outside of Taiwan and China): Here, the expectation often looks different. In more hierarchical business environments, the question is not how can I learn this tool? but rather who can deliver this for me? Tools are frequently wrapped into service offerings where the provider operates in the background. The value proposition shifts from self-service empowerment to trusted delegation: the client doesn’t need to navigate the complexity, because someone else, perceived as the expert, takes responsibility.
For marketers, these structural differences change adoption patterns, ROI, and ultimately customer trust.
The same product must be framed as an instrument of independence in Europe, and as a reliable, full-service solution in Asia. Overlooking this cultural divide is one of the main reasons why “global” strategies often underperform.
Conclusion
DMEXCO once again showed why it remains a must-attend event: passion, vision, and a pulse check on where our industry is heading. This year was undeniably the year of AI, sometimes inspiring, sometimes overwhelming, and often still in the stage of shiny promises.
What stood out for me were the contrasts: between AI as a buzzword and AI with real purpose, between digital hype and analogue creativity, and between global tools and local cultural realities.
Most of all, I was reminded that technology alone does not travel well across borders — it’s the cultural lens through which we design, market, and adopt these tools that determines success.
As always, I left with a mix of excitement and curiosity. Excitement for the creativity and energy that drive this industry forward. Curiosity about how the current AI hype will settle into something more grounded by next year, and how intercultural intelligence will hopefully become part of that grounding.
And that’s why I’ll be back again: to watch, to listen, and to keep exploring how technology, culture, and marketing continue to shape each other.
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