ePrize's Top Three Takeaways from CES 2011

Posted by Melissa Summers on Tuesday, January 11, 2011

-Ryan Schram, Group Vice President, Business Development, ePrize -

Our team just returned from another wildly successful and rewarding experience at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show!

The ePrize crew had an excellent opportunity to spend time with our clients, network with others, and participate in invitation-only sessions on the latest and greatest in the digital space.

While there is an endless list of interesting things we learned about and people we spoke to, here are our top three takeaways from this year's show:

From 'marketing geek' to 'marketing chic' On the surface, it is easy to get caught up in the hoopla of what CES poses to be. It is, after all, the largest convention in the United States and occupies the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, as well as a majority of conference space at the resorts on the Strip.

Back in the days when COMDEX was the industry's largest event, it was a closed-loop trade show where a majority of the action happened on the show floors in booths.

Flash-forward to more recent years and CES has evolved and matured into a digitally-integrated super-conference. If you are anyone who uses digital means to communicate with your customer base, this has become THE place to see and be seen.

For example, Alan Mulally from Ford gave his third annual CES keynote with a large number of the Ford global marketing staff in tow. The team announced an all-electric-powered Ford Focus -- an unheard of place to make a product rollout by old Detroit standards.  

Other headliners ranging from General Electric Chairman Jeff Immelt and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to WPP head Sir Martin Sorrell were in executive roundtables, hosting clients at high-end parties and exhibiting general interest in the category.

Tablets, tablets, and more tablets! Talk about sheep following the herd. Since launch of Apple's uber successful iPad (which was announced intentionally following CES 2010 to harness the entire press cycle to itself), manufacturers decided that to be relevant and cool for CES 2011, they had to showcase a tablet device of some kind to try and compete against the folks from Cupertino.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer was extremely excited about Windows 7 during his opening night keynote. Motorola Mobility released their latest Android effort named XOOM. BlackBerry threw a coming out party for its new "PlayBook" device. Heck, even the Pandigital folks - you know, the company that makes the digital photo frames? -- decided to get into the game and come up with an ultra-low-end unit for the sake of doing it (you can imagine the snickering that went on about that, much to the chagrin of Microsoft and Motorola).

All of these devices, price points, and options are great because, in theory, they provide more options to consumers, right?

By a large margin, the majority of OEMs are helping Google's Android effort to scale wildly by way of their catchy, open source OS. Yet, the near-term Achilles heel will likely be that the hardware build quality varies dramatically from unit to unit.

This creates an interesting catch-22 for the Android camp: depending on which unit from which manufacturer you buy, your experience and satisfaction will be totally different - even though you're running the "same" operating system.

That effect harkens back to two decades ago when discount PCs began to reach the marketplace. Microsoft learned the hard way that this experiential disconnect tarnished the Windows brand name. In fact, it greatly aided in opening the door for Apple to come into the market with an integrated OS/hardware solution and begin stealing share.

The next battle in this war: will Google step in and demand specific hardware standards from their OEMs? Will their decentralized approach and fractionalized marketing message be able to take the throne away from Apple? Is BlackBerry still relevant to the enterprise community? 2011 will be a defining year for this category that is white hot in its growth potential and in consumer interest.

Get ready to ditch your desktop and move to mobile The tech-famous journalism team of Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher from The Wall Street Journal's "All Things D," hosted an invitation-only event. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showcased his company's focus on a new class of mobile computing, powered by their latest Tegra processor.

As a leading video graphics chipmaker, Nvidia sees a bright future through diversification and enabling consumers to use devices currently considered "mobile" as their primary computing devices overall in 3-4 years' time – if not sooner.

Huang even demo'ed a "super-phone" (as he called it) running Android and powered by Tegra that could not only handle multi-tasking and more mundane tasks that users typically need from their laptops, but he also played 1080p full-motion video without a single hiccup. All of this with exceptionally efficient power consumption and a seamless user experience promise.

Imagine a world where you could replace 2-3 of your primary devices (laptop/desktop, media center, and mobile device) with one complete device that acted differently based on where you dock it and the kind of accessories you attach to it.

If Nvidia, Intel, and AMD have their way, you will see this be available as a mainstream technology that not only positively impacts consumers, but causes the marketing community to again redefine what a digital experience could be.

More than ever, CES has become a destination for marketers of all kinds – to learn about new ideas, new mediums, and to explore new partnerships.