6 Real Trends Behind CES's Tech Headlines #DigitalSense

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this January was once again a glitzy showcase of technical wizardry and the world’s hottest innovations. You probably read about at least some of the event’s headline grabbers which for 2016 included TVs you could roll up, drones big enough to carry people, fridges capable of photographing their innards, cars capable of driving themselves and wearables capable of measuring anything & everything. Not all of these devices are likely to find their ways into very many homes any time soon, so now the dust has settled on the event it’s interesting to take a hype-free look at what they really mean for everyday consumers & marketers.

1. Some Perspective on Virtual Reality
VR was everywhere at CES this year, from giant interactive stands to headsets tucked away unexpectedly in tiny booths. Oculus grabbed the biggest headlines, with news of its imminent availability underlining the official message that this was finally the year real consumers would be throwing themselves into VR en masse. Unfortunately the $600 price point (and need for a high-end PC) underlined the fact that we’re really still several years away from this level of technology being anything like accessible to average consumers.

There are wider challenges for VR too around availability of content, or more specifically what forms of content are improved (and not confused) by the format – hard core video gaming is an obvious fit, but a controlled perspective is central to the impact of most TV shows & movies and there’s little to be gained by being able to look away from the action. VR will still generate easy headlines so expect marketers to continue lining up for their slice of the action, but most of what they deliver will be small-scale experiential or stunt activations.

2. Scaling & Affordability
There’s always a disconnect between high end gadget announcements and average consumer purchases but, away from the big announcements, affordability was also a theme of the show. Connected NFC bands which cost $20 a couple of years ago are now $1 stickers, and if bought in bulk will be just a few cents in the near future – this starts to open up opportunities to start tagging & tracking even the most throwaway of consumer products. Even VR’s biggest short term opportunity isn’t a top end headset but the possibility that some brand or publisher might bite the bullet and scale a low-fi solution, like Google Cardboard, into millions of households. The automobile industry was there in force too but whilst concept cars grabbed the spotlights their consistent march towards making connectivity & app integration standard in very mainstream cars will be where most of us affordably feel the change.

3. The Internet of Many Things
Plenty of new products stepped forwards to join the ranks of connected ‘Internet of Things’ devices again this year, but for me the interesting thing is not any single device’s ability to talk to the wider world but the power of when a few of those devices start networking together. Affordability helps again here too with the prospect that consumers can connect a wide range of products together, so you don’t simply have a thermostat you can control from your phone but one which knows when you’re leaving work, turns on the lights as it unlocks the front door for you and has already placed & delivered an order of milk because you ran out that morning. This is hampered for now by competing standards but there are signs of one or two leaders emerging, and that others will ultimately play ball with one another in the background

4. Tech Without A Purpose
All of which doesn’t quite counteract the continued trend for a lot of technical innovations & new products to exist simply because they can. There are a lot of second & third generation products only really now fleshing out their use cases (and once gimmicky things like 3D printers now proving themselves to be truly disruptive work horses) but plenty of other items shown are truly destined to do no more than gather dust in a draw. Certainly the age of necessity as the main mother of invention is increasingly behind us, but possibility seems a pretty powerful replacement motivator - as ever marketers should be wary however of doing something just because it is technically possible.

5. Rectangles of Light
If VR grabbed headlines it was still screens in all shapes & sizes that managed to dominate floor space – large screens, mobile screens, wrist-sized screens, curved screens, bending screens, car dashboard screens, pretty much any type of screen you can think of. For all the new opportunities of technology the biggest one is still in owning the content that ultimately gets displayed in these rectangles of light. We can obsess over where that content comes from (live TV, online streaming, digital downloads…) but the end result is the same and essentially identical from a user perspective. Nothing at this CES did anything to threaten the fact that imagery, video & sound are still the biggest and most powerful influencers of people & culture.

6. Twitter's Live Connection to Culture
Twitter didn’t have a huge show booth but privately converted a Las Vegas ballroom into an entire indoor town with shops, restaurants & a cinema to meet in.

They’re taking a PR battering but the road map of products they’re building with better video integration and ways to fully tap into their wider audience puts them in a far stronger place than they seem to get credit for. Rumours of 10,000 character Tweets loomed but users are already hacking the platform with screenshots of longer paragraphs so the use case is clear – like Facebook’s Instant Articles it’s better to have quick access to more information than to have to link elsewhere. Ignore the loud voices of platform purists and remember that the majority of users don’t Tweet at all & log on merely to consume the content that’s out there. Their vision to be a ‘live connection to culture’ is a richer cornerstone than any allegiance to a character limit they’ve long since gone beyond. 

I am a marketer who helps global brands make sense of media in a digital world; Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. #DigitalSense is my attempt to cut through the hype that too often surrounds the industry. I am Global Digital Partner at Carat, an agency redefining how the world's biggest brands think about media, though these are 100% my own thoughts.