THIS IS MARKETING 2026: Our Recap of Day One in Frankfurt

marketer UX attended THIS IS MARKETING in Frankfurt on 11 November 2026. The conference ran for 2 days in the Festhalle, the Forum and, for the first time, the Congress Center of Messe Frankfurt. The organizers expected more than 8,000 attendees, over 100 speakers and over 150 exhibitors.

We spent the first day there, from 11 am until just after 5 pm: 6 talks on 4 stages, catching only the start or the end of 2 of them, and a good hour in the exhibition. This is what we saw, what stuck with us and what it means for our work and for our clients.

Our impressions of the day are also available as a video:

Key takeaways

• AI was the topic of the day. Half of the talks we saw and many of the booths were about AI in marketing, in sales or in agency work.
• Humans keep the final say. Both Jousef Murad and Tobias Grüneberg showed AI systems that get work done. Approval and the client relationship stay with people.
• The strongest numbers came from SNOCKS. According to a slide by Johannes Kliesch, influencer marketing returned €1.52 in revenue per euro spent, Meta only €1.07.
• Conversations are raw material. Client calls, talks and interviews hold content that no AI knows on its own.
• One clear sentence works. In the exhibition, the people who stuck with us could say in one sentence what their company does.

Our day at a glance

Times according to the organizer’s agenda. The talks we saw were held in German.

Mainstage: LinkedIn reach with Céline Flores Willers

From the opening in the Festhalle, we caught the end of the talk by Céline Flores Willers. Her topic was 3 levers for reach on LinkedIn.

3 levers for reach on LinkedIn

What stuck was her list of where post ideas come from: your own working day, newsletters, conflicts, your own lessons, conversations with colleagues and, above all, client conversations. When a client talks about their problems, that is almost a finished post. She also asked the audience which uncomfortable truth in their industry is never said out loud. That is where posts with an opinion come from.

Right after that, the Congress Stage opened with Sebastian Auer, also on LinkedIn. The host asked the room who is active on LinkedIn regularly. Almost every hand went up. When she asked who wins new clients there predictably, far fewer hands stayed up. This gap between activity and lead generation ran through the whole day.

Masterclass Red: Dr. René Delpy and the profit brand with Claude

We went to Dr. René Delpy, co-founder at Matthias Niggehoff, because he announced he would build a brand for B2B founders live in Claude. We work with Claude every day ourselves.

Masterclass in the Congress Center

His core thesis: in many fields, AI knows more than the expert. What it lacks are stories, experience and judgment. Loading all your course material into an AI gains little, because the AI already has that knowledge. What is valuable is what only exists in the founder’s head. Delpy gets it out through conversations and their transcripts, for example from Fireflies and Google Drive, which he has connected directly to Claude. A single talk turns into several LinkedIn posts in his own voice, with fixed style rules against typical AI phrasing.

He added a thought we share: the biggest lever of AI is not saving a few percent in costs, but bringing in more revenue.

AI/Tech Stage: Jousef Murad and the CORE Engine

Jousef Murad, founder of APEX, spoke about a problem every agency knows: fulfillment falls behind. New clients mean more work, more work means more staff, and the margin does not grow with it.

What manual fulfillment costs

His example on the slide: 20 clients with 20 hours of manual work each per month, at €45 per hour including overheads. That is €18,000 per month for fulfillment alone. Murad’s answer is the CORE Engine, a process in 4 steps:

• Capture: everything about the client is collected, from goals and guidelines to the transcripts from sales and kick-off calls.
• Optimize: the AI organizes the material into a clean client file.
• Refine: from a few questions to the client, it derives the core promise and key messages.
• Execute: ads, scripts and landing pages are created in minutes. The team reviews, the client receives.

He was clear about one distinction: “AI-first” does not mean “human second”. His slide put it like this: “KI macht die Arbeit. Ihr habt das letzte Wort.” (AI does the work. You have the final say.) According to Murad, every process step has 4 options: standardize it, automate it, drop it entirely or support it with AI while a human approves.

What we liked most was the automated flow after a contract is signed: one form is filled in, then the welcome email, onboarding, client file and kick-off appointment run on their own. That is exactly what we want to build for our own clients.

Mainstage: Johannes Kliesch and the SNOCKS numbers

In the afternoon we went back to the Festhalle for the keynote by Johannes Kliesch, co-founder of SNOCKS. He shared 5 lessons from 10 years of SNOCKS, and he shared real numbers.

ROAS by channel at SNOCKS

The slide we talked about most shows ROAS as revenue after returns per euro spent, January to October 2026. Influencer marketing came in at 1.52, Google Ads at 1.37, TV at 1.15 and Meta at 1.07. One channel was far ahead at 5.7, and the slide left it as a question mark. Another slide showed influencer marketing ahead of Meta in every country listed, in Germany by 1.51 to 1.17. A third slide called TikTok Shop the number 1 route right now, with the example of the brand FEMTIS, which went from 0 to €58,000 in monthly revenue there.

These numbers matter to anyone who spends ad budget on Meta. That is why they get their own article.

Congress Stage: Tobias Grüneberg and his AI employee Kai

The day ended on a very practical note. Tobias Grüneberg, founder of LeanMedia, introduced Kai, an AI employee who takes over marketing tasks in his agency.

Congress Stage in the afternoon

What Kai does, according to Grüneberg:

• every Monday at 8 am, a summary of the ad accounts via WhatsApp instead of a meeting
• reports that explain the numbers against the current economic situation
• lowering budgets and swapping tired creatives when cost per lead rises
• editing videos that Grüneberg drops into a folder, including script and music
• an interactive sales presentation a few minutes after the first call

Important for context: Grüneberg said explicitly that this does not mean getting rid of staff. Until now, there was only one way to grow, which was hiring more people. Today, there is another way. His line on it: “Happy Mitarbeiter, happy Chef.” (Happy staff, happy boss.)

Our view: reporting, video editing and presentations are exactly the tasks AI handles well today. For changes to ad budgets, we rely on human approval ourselves, as Murad describes. More on both approaches will follow in a separate article on AI employees in agencies.

The exhibition: GEO checks, content studios and the one sentence

Between talks and in the late afternoon, we walked the exhibition in the Forum. 3 things stood out.

A content studio as a booth

GEO has arrived at the booths. One SEO agency promoted a free GEO check, in other words the question of whether a brand shows up in ChatGPT and other AI assistants. How we help brands get there is described on our page about GEO and LLMO.

Booths as studios. We especially liked the booths where something happened. One exhibitor had built a glass studio where visitors could record content on the spot. Another offered free consultations and recorded them for YouTube. Both booths produced their own content along the way.

A sentence that sticks. The conversations we remember best were the ones where someone could say in one sentence what their company solves and for whom. For us, that is the most important lesson for any trade show appearance.

Our conclusion

Our impression after one day: AI has arrived in marketing, on stage and at the booths. We took away the most where someone showed concrete numbers and processes, like Kliesch, Murad and Grüneberg. We hold ourselves to the same standard, for example with our own numbers from over 200,000 impressions with ChatGPT ads.

Chris and Aleksey at THIS IS MARKETING 2026

What we are taking away and putting into practice:

• Conversations as the basis for content, for us and for our clients.
• Automated onboarding after a contract is signed, modeled on the CORE Engine.
• AI agents compared. We are testing Grok Bot by xAI against our own agents built on Claude and will report back.
• 2 more articles on this day: the SNOCKS numbers on influencer marketing versus Meta, and AI employees in agencies.

THIS IS MARKETING was worth it for us: talks with real numbers, good conversations in the exhibition and plenty of ideas for our own work. If you go in 2027, plan your stages in advance. With 3 buildings on the fairground and parallel talks, your plan decides how much you take home. And if you want to know how we use AI in marketing and websites, get in touch.

Cover image: Festhalle and Messe Frankfurt fairground, photo by Paul Colin Hennig (firstdorsal.eu), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped. All other photos: marketer UX.