DMEXCO 2026: Our Experience and Key Insights on AI Transparency

Introduction

On September 23 and 24, we attended DMEXCO 2026 in Cologne, one of Europe's leading events for digital marketing, advertising, technology, and commerce.

The scale of this year's edition impressed us greatly: more than 40000 attendees, 2200 brands represented, and around 1000 speakers delivering over 230 hours of talks, panels, and masterclasses across 17 stages [1]. Koelnmesse was buzzing with activity, ideas, and conversations, with artificial intelligence (AI) clearly at the center of many of them.

We had a great time. DMEXCO brought together knowledgeable speakers and practitioners from across marketing, technology, media, and commerce, and many of the sessions gave us new perspectives on how AI is already changing these industries.

Just as valuable were the conversations we had with other attendees, exhibitors, marketers, agencies, and technology providers throughout the two days. They gave us a closer look at how organizations are currently thinking about AI, where they see opportunities, and where important questions remain unresolved.

We were especially excited by the strong interest in Kladero and vera[tag]. Many of the conversations we had confirmed that organizations are actively looking for better ways to handle AI-content disclosure and transparency across channels, and that the need for practical, scalable solutions is becoming increasingly clear.

Insights on AI Transparency

As marketers and content creators rely increasingly on AI-generated and AI-modified content in their campaigns, publishing workflows, and customer communications, transparency is becoming a much more relevant concern. Thus, it was no surprise that AI transparency was featured prominently across a number of talks and discussions at DMEXCO.

Many different perspectives were presented, but these three themes stood out to us and received particularly strong attention from both attendees and speakers:

• Regulatory pressure is increasing. Organizations are facing growing expectations to disclose when and how AI is used, driven both by regulation and by platform-specific requirements. In particular, in the EU, the EU AI Act [2] introduces concrete transparency requirements for certain AI systems and AI-generated or AI-modified content, which we discussed in a previous blog post. Similar rules are also emerging elsewhere, such as the California AI Transparency Act [3].

• Transparency and audience trust come first. Clear disclosure is increasingly seen not only as a compliance requirement, but as an important part of maintaining credibility with audiences, customers, and users. For brands in particular, poor or missing disclosure can create a perception of dishonesty or manipulation, potentially damaging trust and, over time, brand value.

• Transparency does not have to hurt engagement. Several discussions challenged the assumption that disclosure necessarily makes content less effective. Done well, transparency can be integrated into the content experience without distracting from the message or reducing its impact. More importantly, a recurring point in the talks was that engagement is driven primarily by the quality and relevance of the content itself. Low-effort content tends to perform poorly whether it is AI-generated or not, while AI-assisted or AI-generated content that is created thoughtfully, fits the context, and respects the audience can still be highly engaging.

How vera[tag] Can Help

The discussions at DMEXCO reinforced many of the practical challenges that vera[tag] by Kladero was built to address: disclosures need to be clear, consistent, scalable, and adaptable to different channels without getting in the way of the content itself.

If you are a content creator, publisher, agency, or organization working with significant volumes of AI-generated or AI-modified content, vera[tag] provides tools for both presenting disclosures to your audience and managing them over time.

vera[tag] was designed from the outset with the transparency obligations of the EU AI Act in mind, together with the transparency guidelines issued by the European Commission and the concrete disclosure specifications set out in the Code of Practice.

With a vera[tag] subscription, you get a comprehensive set of tools for managing AI-content disclosures across their full lifecycle:

• Tools for disclosing AI-generated and AI-manipulated content across websites, blogs, social media, online shops, and other publishing channels.
• Highly configurable visual disclosure components, with several ready-to-use styles and themes, including the icon set provided by the Code of Practice and vera[tag]'s own disclosure designs.
• Flexible disclosure information that can be adapted to different use cases while retaining sensible defaults for common scenarios.
• Context-aware and page-adaptive disclosure presentation, including overlays and other mechanisms designed to integrate naturally with the surrounding content.
• Disclosure information presented in the user's language, helping make disclosures understandable across multilingual audiences.
• Accessible and machine-readable disclosure presentation, including support for assistive technologies such as screen readers and structured disclosure information that can be processed programmatically.
• Comprehensive documentation for both your team and end users, explaining how disclosures are configured, presented, and interpreted.
• Multi-account and team-management functionality supporting traceability and accountability across the disclosure workflow.
• … and much more.

Together, these capabilities are designed to make disclosure management more consistent and efficient, particularly when content is published across multiple channels or at scale. We continue to develop vera[tag] as disclosure expectations, platform requirements, and regulatory frameworks evolve.

How Kladero Can Help

Not every AI-transparency challenge can be solved with an off-the-shelf product. Organizations may have their own publishing systems, approval processes, technical constraints, or regulatory requirements that call for a more tailored approach.

Beyond vera[tag], Kladero helps organizations design and implement AI-transparency and disclosure processes that fit their specific needs. This can include custom technical solutions, integration with existing content and publishing workflows, consulting on disclosure approaches, and targeted training for the teams responsible for creating, reviewing, and publishing AI-assisted content.

If AI transparency is becoming a practical challenge for your organization, we would be glad to discuss how to approach it.

Summary

We had a great time at DMEXCO 2026, meeting marketers, agencies, publishers, technology providers, and other professionals from across the industry.

The talks and conversations gave us valuable perspectives and a deeper understanding of how marketing, online content creation, and commerce are adapting to new AI technologies, how workflows are changing, and how organizations are approaching AI transparency in practice.

At Kladero, we are proud and excited to be part of this transition and to contribute to it with practical solutions for AI transparency and responsible AI use. We are definitely looking forward to future editions of DMEXCO and to continuing the conversations we started this year in Cologne.

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