DMEXCO 2026 is over, and it was a big week for us. PromptMarketing is nine months old. On 23 and 24 September in Cologne we had our own booth, a fully booked masterclass on ChatGPT Ads, and a seat inside the DMEXCO team.
I have visited DMEXCO more than ten times. This year I was there in three roles: DMEXCO team member as Country Representative for the Netherlands, exhibitor with PromptMarketing, and masterclass speaker.
A fully booked masterclass on ChatGPT Ads
On Thursday 24 September at 13:45 I gave the masterclass Bridging GEO and ChatGPT Ads on stage MC7E. The subtitle was the message: engineer the answer, then the ad below it. The session was fully booked, with more than 100 people in the room.
You can watch the full talk on the DMEXCO platform.
The talk covered the first European numbers from seven ChatGPT Ads accounts in five verticals, up to 19 September 2026:
Click rate 2.14%, against 1.49% on Meta and 6.64% on Google Search.
Cost per click €0.70, against $1.72 on Meta and $5.42 on Google Search.
Cost per 1,000 impressions €15.08. Published US tests show $3 to $22 per click and CPMs above $65.
Click rates at Meta level, at well under half the price of a Meta click. The European auction is still quiet. After we moved to manual bids below the suggested bid, the cost per click fell by 10% to 72% across our accounts.
Then the engineering: context hints written from GEO research instead of keywords, product feeds for e-commerce, server-side conversion measurement with the Conversions API, and running Ads Manager from Codex. For our US B2B pilot, more than 80% of the volume came from problem conversations, not from vendor comparisons.
Want to see how this works in practice? Read our case on ChatGPT Ads for three e-commerce webshops.
Talking to OpenAI
DMEXCO also brought OpenAI to Cologne. Dave Dugan, Head of Global Ads Solutions at OpenAI, spoke on stage about measuring the next era of marketing. We spoke with him about the product developments of ChatGPT Ads. For an agency that runs these campaigns every day, that direct line matters.
Our own booth
Our own booth at DMEXCO was a dream come true. We showed how we work in three steps: Understand what AI says about your brand, Engineer the organic answer, and Grow with ChatGPT Ads. The question on the wall was simple: is your brand in the answer?
A booth is a team effort. Thank you to Roland Kettle, Erik Jan Reijenga, Paul Schukkert, Michel van Luijtelaar, and my 79-year-old father Jan ter Huurne. Together we met hundreds of new people in two days.
Inside the DMEXCO team
This year I also joined the DMEXCO team, in a part-time role next to PromptMarketing. Before this week I had no experience in event management, and the amount of work behind the show surprised me. When I arrived on Monday, the Koelnmesse halls were still being built. Especially the Disney stand was unique this year.
Thank you to Jan Garnefeld for bringing me on board, to Verena Gruendel, the best show host, and to my colleagues Thissanth Vigneswaran, Pascal Palt, Lena Pletzinger, Vanessa Fechner, Leska Winkelhaus and many others.
What comes next
PromptMarketing is my focus. DMEXCO showed how much two days of real conversations are worth, and the more of our work moves into AI workflows, the more those conversations count. We hope to be back at DMEXCO 2027 and to connect with even more customers and partners. Want to talk about AI search visibility or ChatGPT Ads before then? Let's talk.
Missed the masterclass? Join our free webinar series in October and November. The third session is a full ChatGPT Ads masterclass.
