CES: De-CEaSed?
Microsoft, which usually gives the opening keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, served up a pre-show coup de gras this year: 2012 would be Microsoft’s last year at the show. The Vancouver Sun summed up the tone of the CES obits:
That disparity [between newsorthy products and those that are announced at the show]has been most visible in those years when Apple, which has famously shunned CES, made a product announcement around the same time as the show. Products such as the iPad and the iPhone — both announced at January Apple-only events — became smash hits, household names and industry-changing devices. Bonus points if you remember any products announced at CES the years those products came out.
Are the end-times near for the big behemoth of US tech shows? Maybe. Is this bad news for big tech giants? Nah. But second- and third-tier companies, long used to riding the coat tails of their larger brethren, will find it harder to connect with potential customers, distributors, and above all, the press.
In my years as a reporter for CNBC and CNN, I came to dread the soul-ducking nature of the endless sprawl of CES. It was impossible to see a decent chunk of something everything, much less everything. My editors would always be more interested in my replicating a piece in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times versus original reporting. And inevitably, your live shot site would be right outside a booth with a cheesy soundtrack that was on a seven-minute loop that would rot your brain without pity.
My days began pre-dawn for live shots for early shows (you haven’t lived until you have applied TV makeup in the men’s room mirror of the Las Vegas Convention Center at 5:30am) and extend well in to the night for the de-rigeur dinners, which you attend in the hopes that a wine-soaked executive will spill the beans about a failed product (Gatespotting was a blood sport among journalists). Did I mention the cab lines? Or the unspeakable horror of the Imperial Palace Hotel?
I know. Boo-hoo. I admit it: it was a privilege. These are, of course minor complaints about a major show.
The big draw for many reporters was access to industry leaders. Microsoft would dole out one-on-one interviews with Gates like papal boons, and suddenly my editors would think that I was Edward R. Murrow, Junior. The most interesting one was done in a hotel room adjacent to his suite. The room was cramped, even with the bed torn up and flipped against a wall to make room for the lights and cameras. It was a fairly standard interview with obligatory (and clearly, to him, boring) questions about the latest announcements and futile attempts by me to get him to admit to being a monopolist. Gates, as always, was exceptionally well programmed and well-rehearsed, which, in person, made him seem not really present, as if I were interviewing the Bill Gates Muppet, not the person. But that all changed when I told him that I was working on a profile on Eckhard Pfeiffer, who was CEO of Compaq at the time. Gates snapped to attention, leaned in, and focused on the company’s business model and what he saw as Pfeiffer’s innovation and superlative execution. I would interview Gates many times afterward, but would never again see him so engaged and engaging.
But my all time favorite moment came early one morning when I got a call from my field producer, Stephanie Krikorian (not a misspelling, but we never minded when the maitre d’ assumed that she was related to Kirk Kerkorian):
“We’re not going to make the 7:00 am live shot.” This is a cardinal sin in TV land.
“Why not?”
“Our photog was arrested. For attempted vehicular manslaughter.”
“What? Rusty? Sweet moon-faced innocent Rusty? He looks like he wouldn’t swat a fly.”
“There was a labor protest outside the 7-11 where he stopped to get a coffee. He was trying to edge out of the parking lot and they were banging on his truck, and then someone called the police claiming he tried to hit them.”
You can’t make this stuff up. We made the shot. Rusty was cleared of all charges and Stephanie and I won Best War Story of 1997 for “Rusty, the Baby-Faced Butcher of Vegas” back at CNBC.
No show lasts forever. CES’s nerdy cousin, COMDEX, collapsed under its own weight in 2003. The two shows, just two months apart were just too similar, and undoubtedly, many marketers found them hitting their budget lines in the same quarter. But it first made an extravagantly wealthy man of Sheldon Adelson. Adelson, now one of the top ten wealthiest Americans, sold COMDEX in 1995 to Japan’s Softbank. And yup, it’s that Sheldon Adelson, according to the New York Times, is putting those COMDEX and casino riches to work by funding Newt Gingrich’s superpac. Ya gotta love it when a story wraos around itself like that.
One of my hard-and-fast rules as a reporter (and probably a good one for life in general) is that there is no substitute for showing up. The personal connections and a sense of shared experience will always matter more than the content itself. So while CES may diminish in relevance with the loss of major sponsors (including as the New York times reports, increasingly wary mobile carriers), I’d probably still sign up for another tour of duty if I were still on the beat. Still, there’s a good chance that I would get shot down when my editors saw the proliferation of live feeds from CES that are now available. They cover a lot of ground at a very good price:
Just a couple of years ago, if these feeds even existed, they were flagged in press releases and presented on individual corporate websites. It’s a testament to how much Facebook is reordering the web in everything from content aggregation and consumption, to search. And because it’s on Facebook, we know how many people are watching, including which of our cool kid friends are in the audience. I bet that a year from now, event-driven companies like mine will to a great degree measure success by Facebook stream attendance. I bet Rusty would think that’s a great idea.
