DMEXCO 2024: Balancing A View of the Future with the Realities of Today
This year’s DMEXCO conference, held in Cologne, stood as a vivid reminder of the immense potential of AI to revolutionise the digital marketing ecosystem. Under the theme “Prompting the Future,” AI was central to nearly every conversation, panel, and keynote speech. Discussions ranged from generative models producing content to intelligent systems promising hyper-personalization or optimizations of media buys.
A panel with brand executives from Nestlé, Telekom, and Danone discussed the varied approaches to using AI in marketing. While all three companies utilise AI, their priorities differ: Telekom takes a more experimental approach, using AI-generated voices and people in advertising. Nestlé, by contrast, sets strict ethical boundaries, rejecting AI-generated humans and animals in ads, while Danone emphasises using AI for efficiency improvements, without adopting generative AI in marketing.
However besides those more practical examples often discussions were at the more conceptual stage, sometimes even mischaracterizing non-AI technologies as AI.
The Dangers of Losing Focus on the "Now"
As with every technological shift, the excitement about tomorrow’s possibilities can sometimes overshadow today’s concrete opportunities and challenges. As brands and marketers, we must remember that the success of tomorrow's innovations hinges on how effectively we navigate today’s landscape.
While AI tools may be the shiny new trend, successful marketing in 2024 relies on staying grounded in current realities—or risk missing immediate opportunities. One such opportunity, barely mentioned at DMEXCO, is the immense power of the content selection algorithms on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Leveraging these algorithms effectively within marketing activities can unlock significant potential, making them one of the most impactful AI applications today.
The Most Impactful AI Application Today
The content selection algorithms of social platforms determine what content millions of users see and when they see it. They use AI to analyse various signals such as user behaviour to tailor each user's feed to their preferences, surfacing only the most valuable and relevant content. This marks a significant shift from the earlier follower-based models, placing increasing importance on each piece of content being relevant, authentic, and valuable to each user.
With over 80% of Germans spending an average of 1 hour and 40 minutes on social media daily, this presents a significant underutilised opportunity for brands to harness these algorithms. By creating consumer-centric, relevant, and valuable content, they can leverage organic distribution to reach millions of potential customers.
One of the few talks highlighting the power of organic social media was the fireside chat with hitschies CEO, Philipp Hitschler-Becker. He shared how the brand engaged audiences on TikTok, Instagram & Co, achieving success purely through organic growth without paid promotions. Hitschler-Becker stressed the value of authenticity and humour in marketing, noting that their sometimes “cringy” campaigns helped the brand go viral and connect with their audience.
Social-First Strategies: Adapting to a New Era of Attention
This not only demonstrates the power of organic social but also highlights the need for a fundamental change in the way brands should approach campaigns with platforms on the rise prioritising short-form content. Traditional creative approaches, with long lead times and big budgets, are increasingly being outpaced by nimble, social-first content that can be quickly produced and deployed to align with shifting consumer attention and cultural trends.
This doesn't mean we should abandon traditional creativity altogether, but it does mean we need to adapt. The shift in social algorithms, particularly on platforms like TikTok, demands a new creative approach—one that prioritises engagement, interactivity, and authenticity over polished perfection. Brands that succeed today are those that spark meaningful connections by deeply understanding their audiences, what they care about, and how the algorithms on these platforms function in order to play into them and push their content to the top of the feed.
The key to maximising the value of these algorithms is to use insights from organic social content to inform broader marketing strategies. Organic social provides a unique understanding of which messaging and creatives resonate with consumers, offering both quantitative and qualitative insights. By applying these learnings from high-performing organic content to paid ads and traditional campaigns, brands can improve effectiveness, reduce risk with validated ideas, and ultimately maximise ROI across their entire marketing strategy—using AI, today, at no additional cost.
One of the talks touching on this was a case study from OTTO, showing how they used the learnings from their social content to inform their most recent DOOH campaign - as both channels have a similarly short attention span.
Looking Forward— While not Losing Sight of Today
The energy and enthusiasm around AI at DMEXCO 2024 were palpable. There’s no doubt that AI will continue to profoundly transform digital marketing, but we must take care not to become so enamoured with tomorrow’s possibilities that we lose sight of today’s realities. Brands that can balance a vision of the future with a keen understanding of the now will be the ones that thrive in 2024 and beyond.
Ultimately, marketing success hinges on staying agile and adapting to a constantly evolving environment. AI may be the future, but mastering today’s tools, platforms, and strategies is equally crucial - especially if one of the most powerful applications of AI, organic social, is already right in front of us and massively underutilised by the majority of marketers and brands. As Dorit Posdorf, CMO at DocMorris, said in the closing panel, in 2025 “organic will be the name of the game”.
