Mobile Fix: CES – an opportunity-fest
As CES comes to a close, Addictive! founder, Simon Andrews, looks at some of the main themes to emerge from the tech fest – from terrible clichés to the ever-increasing importance of content.
So it’s the New Year. Whilst many people are still persevering with resolutions around getting fit and healthy, a large proportion of the ad industry is in Las Vegas wining and dining clients in an attempt to matchmake them with tech companies.
Along with SxSW and Mobile World Congress, CES is one of the increasingly important opportunities for smart brands to connect with Tech. And just as they do at Cannes, agencies show up to make sure their rivals aren’t courting their clients.
But as the more progressive companies like Mondelez and Unilever look to build direct relationships with tech companies, agencies seek a role orchestrating their other clients’ conversations with Tech and startups. Whilst people like Founders Forum are really good at this sort of matchmaking, and able to look for wider business benefits, the agency speed dating is inevitably more around marketing.
But as Google, Apple Facebook and Amazon aren’t at CES, the show is divided between older tech companies seeking to reinvent themselves and new tech players looking to productise recent innovation.
The big themes are (still) the Internet of Things and Wearables. Cisco want to be the glue that holds the Internet of Things together and believe there is a $19 trillion market opportunity.
Clearly lots of other people believe there is money to be made but as an FT writer put it, much of CES seems like technology in search of a purpose.
Virtually everyone has a smart watch on their stand – including Intel. But given Smart watches are so last year, people have been seeing what else they can make smart.
Bosch has an app that will park your car.
LG showed their connected fridge; just like they did in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Now, we have been talking about connected fridges since 2001 but the fact we still don’t have one isn’t really a problem. This cliche just doesn’t meet a real consumer need.
The other cliché of the Internet of Things is the connected toothbrush. Colgate, Philips, P&G and others have all looked at this area and now someone has actually launched one.
The next contender for IoT cliché could be the smart coffee cup. Nescafe were in town and they were pitched some novel ideas:
1) A smart portable coffee mug with – wait for it – WiFi, a USB connector, Bluetooth, an NFC chip, GPS and a sipping cover that displayed, among other things, the temperature of the beverage and New York Times headlines.
2) A smart coffee machine controlled from a mobile device that is, of course, connected to the cloud and allows sharing of things like brews and recipes.
One of our key tenets nowadays is pretotyping – how to learn whether something is a good idea, at minimal cost. A core technique is setting up a single webpage to capture email addresses and buying Google Adwords to drive traffic. If lots of people click through and sign up, the product has a chance. If not, back to the drawing board.
Hopefully one of the agencies running the speed dating event will invest a few dollars with Google on this particular idea.
But there is a big opportunity here. Getting the right brand to partner with you on your product is probably the best thing for many tech businesses. Partnering with OralB is probably the best way for Kolibree to sell connected toothbrushes.
And if there is a market for smart coffee mugs, Nescafe (or Starbucks) is probably going to monetise it better than a start up. So this sort of corporate venturing can be valuable – if you have the right people helping you.
newTV
The core of CES used to be TV and it is still a big part. Whilst we believe that devices like Chromecast (where the cleverness sits in the smartphone) will eventually win out over smart TVs and set-top boxes, lots of big brands need to avoid a future of dumb glass screens. Samsung, Sony and LG all launched new products, as did the 5th biggest TV manufacturer HiSense – part of the sizeable Chinese contingent at CES.
Probably the most interesting development in TV was the launch of LG’s new interface using the WebOS they bought from Palm when HP acquired them. Originally designed for smartphones and tablets WebOS seems to work well on TV – which sort of validates our thinking around Chromecast.
Content at CES
Whilst there isn’t the new New Thing we all love, there is some interesting stuff at CES. And lots of it relates to content.
Sony is looking to use its footprint in entertainment to offer services as well as hardware. Given that Intel seem to have dropped their plans for a set-top box and TV service it’s questionable how successful this might be, but by having content they have a chance.
Yahoo also made some noise – helped by the absence of GAFA. And lots of their news was around content. They announced the News App, inspired by the Summly acquisition last year and showed off their new Tumblr enabled Digital Magazines where they have hired big name journalists as editors.
And they featured Katie Couric, the iconic US TV presenter who is the Global Anchor for Yahoo. Coupled with the hire of highly experienced TV exec Dawn Airey to run Europe, Marissa Mayer seems to be reviving the Terry Semel vision of Yahoo as a content creating media company.
With over 800 million monthly users – half of whom are on mobile – ensuring you have great content seems a smart move.
Their other news was also smart – they have announced an app called Aviate – whilst still in beta. It performs a really useful service in that it makes organising apps on an Android phone much much simpler.
By owning it Yahoo gets some significant benefits; more smart mobile talent, the ability to make sure Yahoo apps get prominence and insight into what apps users have – and possibly how often they are used.
That is gold dust. Flurry has a good insight into installed apps through their research products and they are very successfully building an ad business on the back of this. Facebook and Twitter have some insight through using Facebook connect to log in. And of course Google and Apple do, too.
But if Yahoo can get more logged in users – so they can take this information across all Yahoo properties – they can unlock the App download budgets proving so valuable to Facebook.
Our friends at MediaTel are running an event looking at CES which is [definitely, ed] worth going to.
Content is king?
The most interesting thinking we have seen over the past few weeks is actually a few months old. Jeffrey Katzenberg made a fascinating speech at MIPCOM where is made the point that the future of TV is quite healthy. But it’s going to change.
It’s worth watching the whole speech but here are some key quotes:
“Up until very recently, we literally twiddled our thumbs while we waited. There was nothing else to do. Now our thumbs have a higher purpose than to twiddle. Through touch screens, we actually now can touch the world,” he said. “Thanks to these devices, waiting as we know it is dead.”
“In this way, mobile isn’t just complementary to linear, it can serve as an incubator of talent and concepts, and then can actually drive additional traffic to traditional TV.”
“We used to fill it with Tetris. Now we’re going to fill it with rich media.”
But the key thing for us was when Katzenberg said he would pay $25 million per episode for another 3 episodes of Breaking Bad – a sequel. But with one criteria – it has to be delivered in 6 minute segments.
Why? Because he believes that he could get 10 million people to pay 50 cents a day for each of those 6 minute chapters. Posted at 12 noon every day he imagines people eagerly waiting for it to come out. Of course 10 million people paying 50 cents 30 times gives you $150 million – doubling your money.
This is what mobile content is about. Big Picture thinking around great content – delivered at scale. With innovative business models.
We spent a lot of time in 2005 pitching a mobile soap opera called Random Place. Produced by friends in Sydney, this teen-focused soap starred Olympic athletes and stars of Big Brother – a sort of Oz Hollyoaks made for mobile. We never quite managed to make it happen here, but it was a success in Australia. It’s amazing that no-one has done much since.
The time for this type of content is here and it will probably be brand funded. Who is going to do the modern equivalent of BMW’s The Hire?
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website.
MediaTel is hosting a CES debrief at the end of this month. For more information, see our events page