CES 2015: Industry reaction from Mindshare and TubeMogul
Back from Las Vegas, Mindshare’s Jeremy Pounder and TubeMogul’s Jay Prasad share their key take-outs from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
Jeremy Pounder, research director, Mindshare UK
Observing CES from afar, and trying to make sense of it all, at first you can’t help feeling simultaneously over and underwhelmed.
Overwhelmed at the sheer scale and blizzard of announcements, with 52,000 exhibitors hawking their products and clamouring for attention. And slightly underwhelmed that this year’s glimpse into the future looks much like last year’s – and not entirely dissimilar to the year before.
Essentially, we’ve got three categories at CES.
The incremental improvement or the ‘-er factor’ the faster, thinner, curvier and so on. The TV manufacturers were best represented here with Sony’s 0.2 inch 4K TV to the fore.
Then there’s the weird and wonderful – innovations which are often staggering but leave you wondering whether they’ll ever make the mainstream: Toshiba’s slightly unnerving concept robot ChihiraAico, the Belty smart belt which loosens itself when you’ve eaten too much or the iGrow helmet that promotes hair growth.
Most importantly there are the mega trends that we’ve seen before but are creeping inexorably closer – the connected home, 3D printing, driverless cars, drones and, most prominently, wearable tech and the internet of things.
But looking beyond the shiny gizmos, and the nagging sense that we’d seen much of this before, there were two trends I noticed that suggested that the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable tech revolutions might actually be coming into view.
Firstly, there were a series of IoT announcements, not about shiny new connected objects themselves, but about the less glamorous infrastructure that will allow smart objects to connect with one another.
Most significantly, we saw Samsung commit to making all of its products open and capable of talking to other devices and objects. In a similar vein, Nest announced that its open-software programme would be extended to make its products compatible with LG and Phillips products in the home.
These and other announcements collectively suggest we are on the brink of a breakthrough with IoT, moving it beyond a series of independent connected objects that sit in silos and closer to a true interconnected network of devices and objects.
Secondly, on the fringes of CES we saw evidence of a ‘wearable analytics’ trend that may help move wearables beyond basic step-counting and into something more integrated and genuinely useful for consumers. One of the problems with wearables is that they churn out reams of metrics for users but give no real guidance about what it all means.
LifeQ is looking to solve this problem by integrating measurements from wearables with aggregated medical and physiological models to provide users with interpretation, guidance and health recommendations. If it and similar companies are successful, we could see wearables expand into the mainstream from their current fitness fanatic niche.
While the thinner TVs, pocket drones and connected belts may capture the headlines, it’s arguably in the less glamourous stories of infrastructure and analytics that we can see the real lasting significance of this year’s CES. Until next year.
Jay Prasad, VP of global business development, TubeMogul
The More Things Change…
For a few days each year the technology industry descends upon the world’s playground to showcase the hardware that will power the future. In 2015, however, they’ve been joined by another group of equally vigorous partiers: advertisers.
CES has become the inverse of Cannes – an event that has historically celebrated technology and innovation has evolved into a must-attend confab for brands and agencies alike. CMO attendance between 2013 and 2014 rose by 11% according to the show’s organisers – so it’s clear that the event is becoming more relevant for forward-looking marketers.
This year CES provided advertisers with their own dedicated space; Havas joins the likes of Twitter, Google and Yahoo as headliners. Marketers are taking an undeniable interest in the gadgets of tomorrow – and how they can use them to tell their story. Most importantly, consumption patterns for content and how consumers engage is shifting as fast as new products hit the market.
So what should marketers be taking note of?
It was clear this year that unbundling is continuing to gain momentum as premium content and app experiences are freed up for enjoyment on even more devices. Still, TVs remain the dominant screen when it comes to beauty and “WOW” factor.
Despite the plethora of screens and sizes – ranging from over eight feet down to mere inches – the fact that nearly all of these new connected devices have screens is incredibly telling.
Even cars are getting in on the action with touch-screen interfaces that are smarter than ever. As this tech enters the mainstream there will be huge implications for brands looking to leverage geo-location technology like beacons to advertise to consumers on the go.
This proliferation of devices and increased mobility underscores the importance of a single hub from which advertisers can centrally manage campaigns across screens. If marketers don’t consolidate these complex multi-faceted campaigns, they risk losing sight of their audience and will end up chasing them across screens.
With the increased attention on CES from advertisers this year it appears that the industry is indeed gearing up for consumer behaviour to continue to change at pace. And with Apple’s announcement that their watch will support programmatic advertising months before the product is released, you can bet that as quickly as this hardware flies off the shelves, companies will scramble to develop the software that makes it work.
There’s going to be huge opportunities to monetise these new screens – but it’s likely to be a land grab for those looking to get there first.