OMR 2025 Recap: Between Buzzwords and Beer Mat Ideas
19 May 2025
5 min read
5 days in Hamburg. 5 days of team time, client meetings, and deep dives into the digital future. OMR 2025 was not just a trade fair for us as Label Up - it was a festival for feed nerds, growth junkies, and honest conversations.
Here comes our 5 points recap - with personal highlights, exciting insights, and the question: How do we stay relevant in the age of AI?
1. More personal than expected: Offline builds trust
We were surprised how much happens offline again. Conversations at the booth, chance encounters in the OMR garden, or at the after-party with Sido on stage. These were not buzzword battles, but real connections. Many of our existing clients stopped by, there were concrete projects, spontaneous demos - and honest feedback.
Takeaway for us: Google CSS relies heavily on trust. Agencies and merchants want to know who they can trust with their feed setup. Personal meetings like at OMR are worth their weight in gold.
2. AI is no longer an add-on - but infrastructure
Whether at talks by Jens Polomski or in conversations at the booth: AI was everywhere. The question is no longer whether, but where exactly we anchor it in the stack.
For us, this concretely means: Our Labelizer will become smarter. Soon, automatic benchmarks, feed analyses, and other product clusters will be integrated into our labels through AI. The goal: Agencies will only provide a rough direction - and the rest will run automatically.
3. Influencer marketing? No. Feed-fluencing!
Many speakers emphasized: The classic influencer wave is flattening out. What remains: Authentic stories, real product proximity.
Our thought: Why not apply the same idea to product data? A good feed already tells a story today - through titles, product images, price positioning. Those who understand this are not “fluencing” on TikTok - but directly in Google Ads and the shopping algorithm.
4. Team culture instead of constant fire
Angela Ahrendts said in her talk: "Great teams don’t scale on pressure - but on purpose." And honestly: For us, OMR was a kind of team building with purpose. We not only pitched ideas but also reflected, celebrated, and discussed new concepts.
Side Benefit: We sketched some features for our labeling tool on a beer mat in the evening - and validated them the next day.
5. AI2C - The customer journey is being rewritten
Amy Webb outlined a near future where search is replaced by prediction. Multi-agent systems, AI-generated touchpoints, product recommendations before the customer even knows what they need.
What does that have to do with Google Ads? Everything. Because when the journey starts earlier, the feed becomes the first impression. Those who optimize smartly here - with titles, labels, margin rules - gain early. And cheaply.
Conclusion: CSS is not a fringe topic, but your performance foundation
The conversations at OMR confirmed it: Many advertisers have not fully exploited CSS yet. It is often the underestimated lever for more efficient campaigns - especially in connection with labeling & feed optimization.
We come out of the week with a clear mindset: Label Up will be more than CSS. We are building the infrastructure for agencies and retailers to scale based on data - from product synchronization to conversion.
