Best of DMEXCO Worlds: All Five Areas at a Glance in Cologne

Best of DMEXCO Worlds: One Trade Show, Five Perspectives on the Future of Digital Marketing

Ask five players in digital marketing where the industry is heading and you will get five different answers — a retailer, an agency, a media company, a tech provider, and a start-up founder rarely start from the same problem. DMEXCO 2026 does not force those answers into a single narrative. It gives each perspective its own stage and lets the overlaps speak for themselves.

Five areas, one show floor: Commerce in Hall 7, Media in Hall 8, Tech with its own stage and expo space, Agencies on two stages, and the Start-up Area as a stage for everyone whose own booth is still ahead of them. A comparison of the five areas quickly reveals that all players are focused on the same topics: AI, retail media, the end of cookies, and the rise of creators. This isn’t repetition, but rather the same transformation viewed from five different perspectives.

World of Commerce: The Hot Spot for Digital Commerce

Commerce is where the big buzzwords of 2026 — AI, retail media, platform strategy — have to prove themselves against something concrete: does a product actually sell? That is exactly the premise of the World of Commerce. Bastian Scherbeck of segmenta experience, AI Commerce Lab Lead in the e-commerce initiative of the BVDW, describes AI as an entirely new decision-making layer between purchase intent and transaction — a layer on which systems increasingly filter offers, evaluate them, and even buy on their own.

Hall 7 organizes this shift into four connected areas: Expo, Commerce Stage, Commerce Lounge, and the Affiliate & Performance Area, with more than 100 exhibitors — among them Shopware, Shopify, Awin, idealo, and PayPal. The editorial framework comes from the two-day DMEXCO Commerce Summit powered by BVDW, which spans agentic commerce, new platform dynamics, and scalable tech stacks. If you want to understand how retail media actually generates revenue, this is your first stop.

World of Agencies: Agencies at a Crossroads

If Commerce shows what AI does to a transaction, the World of Agencies shows what it does to a business model. Clients increasingly expect integrated solutions rather than individual disciplines. In agencies that used to keep these areas strictly separate, creativity, data expertise, and technical know-how are moving closer together.

Across two stages and more than 70 sessions, the World of Agencies explores how the agency landscape is currently reinventing itself: new structures, alliances between specialists, and the B2B side of the transformation. At the center sits the DMEXCO Creativity Summit powered by DDA, the event brand of the Deutscher Digital Award. There, Anke Herbener (BVDW) and Peer Wörpel (la red) host three sessions with clear questions: what does generative AI really unlock in the creative process? How do brands hold their ground against creator-driven entertainment content? And what is left for agencies once AI writes the brief itself?

The session “Digital Marketing Trends 2026” builds on the media agencies’ established trend monitor and delivers the hard numbers: where budgets are actually moving and which channels are winning or losing.

World of Media: Where Future Media Trends Take Shape

The World of Media focuses on DOOH, which is increasingly booked programmatically, connected TV competing with streaming and linear television for addressable budgets, audio, and creators negotiating for a serious share of the media budget. Corinna Hohenleitner, Vice President of the BVDW and co-host of the Retail & Commerce Media Summit, describes retail and commerce media as the connecting element along the entire customer journey, from first contact to purchase — which is why the summit consistently takes place on the Media Stage and not somewhere off to the side.

The program in Hall 8 mirrors just how fragmented the video landscape has become: the DOOH Summit opens the morning of September 23, the Retail & Commerce Media Summit takes over in the afternoon, and on September 24 the panel “Optimize Everything! Trends in Media 2027” looks a year ahead. In between, the Future TV Stage — curated by Screenforce on day one — brings broadcasters, platforms, and advertisers to one table to negotiate how video will be planned, sold, and measured in the future.

On day two it becomes the Creators’ Stage: the question there is no longer whether creators belong in the media mix, but how their reach, their content, and their communities can be professionally integrated into media and brand strategies. REWE, IQ Digital, Disney, ROSSMANN, and Media Impact are among those expected in the hall.

World of Tech: Which Technologies Matter Now

Every trend negotiated on the commerce floor and the media stages runs on infrastructure — and that is exactly what the World of Tech puts under the microscope. Cookieless targeting, retail and commerce media, AI-based campaign optimization, CTV and streaming ads, and new attribution models define adtech in 2026. On the martech side, generative AI is increasingly feeding into content production and personalization, customer data platforms are evolving into real-time systems with AI-based segments, and data clean rooms enable privacy-compliant collaboration between companies that used to keep their data strictly walled off from one another.

One development is easy to overlook and still hard to overestimate: generative engine optimization, or GEO for short. Because more and more people discover products and brands through AI systems rather than classic search results, the decisive question for companies is shifting: no longer how well a brand ranks on Google, but whether AI systems surface it as an answer at all. And that depends less on the number of tools in use than on how well data, systems, and processes actually work together.

This question is negotiated twice a day at the adtech and martech summits, which have been expanded this year from two-hour to four-hour thematic blocks, and on the Tech Stage, where Google, Amazon, Microsoft, The Trade Desk, and Adobe are among those represented. On September 23, the Young Innovator Challenge shows another side of it: 30 students from Hochschule Düsseldorf, supported by AND Innovation and OnlineDialog, present live solutions in three teams for real business challenges from AI, customer journey, and commerce.

Start-up Area: Where Ideas Turn Into Business

The Start-up Area is designed specifically to facilitate conversations between founders and those who can write a check, seal a partnership, or become their first customers. Around 40,000 trade visitors and more than 700 partners are expected at DMEXCO 2026, and for a young company, visibility in that crowd is worth more than almost anything else on the balance sheet.

On the Start-up Stage, founders have just under ten minutes to present their idea, business model, and why the industry should pay attention. Jung von Matt START and StartupValley round out the program with their own stage sessions. On the evening of September 23, StartupValley will also present the Startup of the Year Award powered by DMEXCO.

The supporting program is hands-on: sessions on how AI is changing brand building, how brand knowledge can be structured so that AI systems can actually use it, and Marvin Hanisch (Jung von Matt IMPACT) also puts common paid media assumptions like “TV is dead” to the test using real-world usage data, providing the kind of guidance start-ups with limited budgets need before committing their spend to a single channel.

DMEXCO Worlds 2026: Where Should You Start?

The answer depends on the question you bring with you to Cologne. Want to know how AI is changing the buying journey? Head to the World of Commerce. If you’re interested in new agency models and creative processes, the Agencies area is the place to be. Media shows where budgets are shifting and how video, retail media, and creators are reshaping the landscape. The World of Tech explores the infrastructure behind it all — from adtech and martech to GEO. And if you want to see which new business models are emerging from these developments, make sure to add the Start-up Area to your agenda.

Chances are, you won’t stick to just one area. That’s exactly what a look at the program makes clear: AI commerce needs the right tech infrastructure, retail media connects commerce and media, creators are transforming media and agency strategies, and AI runs through every area. So rather than mapping out one fixed route through the event, the five areas offer five different entry points into the same transformation. Get your ticket for DMEXCO 2026 now and come to Cologne in September.