THE Consumer Electronics Show ends tomorrow, but many marketers and advertisers have already fled Las Vegas after a busy week of panels, meetings, floor tours, tech demos, parties and meals – sometimes cooking multiple dinners in the same evening to maximize face-to-face meetings. time with potential clients or partners.
Throughout the week, ADWEEK spoke with advertising and marketing executives to learn about the trends and notable developments at this year’s CES and whether spending the second week of January on the Las Vegas Strip is still worth it. penalty.
Of course, almost every executive we spoke to mentioned artificial intelligence and how “agentic” AI – the growing popularity and capabilities of AI agents and chatbots – is changing the way brands and businesses Marketers interact with people. They also pointed out that the sheer scale of CES and the opportunity to meet so many customers in person at the start of the year in one location, makes the conference of 135,000 people unavoidable.
The following comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Florian Adamski, Global CEO, Omnicom Media Group
We have more customers than ever at CES, which shows you something: customers are looking to understand how agencies will cope with technological change and how generative AI will help agencies be leaner, faster and more impactful . This early interest we’re seeing at CES is a precursor to what we’ll see for the rest of the year. Clients will demand answers from agencies to help them solve a more complex and fragmented world, so no rest for the wicked.
The overall theme of CES this year is when AI and marketing will realize some of the promises made. I feel like over the last three years we’ve been talking about potential use cases, starting with generative search. 2025 will be the time when things get going, and agencies and media platforms will need to actually prove to clients how they are driving their business.
It will also be a year of reskilling the workforce and how people begin to collaborate with AI.
Kristi Argyilan, Global Head of Advertising, Uber
I spent 90% of my time at CES meeting with customers. This is an opportunity to get feedback on what we’re doing well and where we can focus next in bulk, so you can start putting models together to understand the state of commercial media more broadly, then specifically the domains. for Uber to continue to build on. Above all be brand new to the roleit was an incredibly productive use of my time.
The theme I keep hearing is that we’ve done a good job using AI to work more efficiently, but have we used it to work more effectively? AI capabilities help us move work through the system faster. We can make creative releases much faster, but are we using it regularly and then optimizing it? How do we actually use AI to speed things up so that we can optimize more than once or twice during a campaign and then get a bigger result? This is the promise we are all looking to see more of as we move forward to 2025.
Josh Campo, CEO of Razorfish
We knew AI was going to be a big topic, but we saw AI with a lot more substance. There was a lot of conversation around Agentic AI, which is about how we are going to use AI in the future.
With AR and XR, I don’t know if we’re completely there yet, but I feel like we’re really close to a viable consumer product. The experience could be a little stronger, but we are way ahead of last year.
Screens inside cars are getting bigger and bigger, which means you have a new entertainment and media space. You also see AI continuing into autonomous driving, which also means drivers will have more attention in that space.
Last year we started to see the connected home evolve a lot. This year, you have standards like Matter, which allow providers to connect seamlessly, regardless of your hub provider. This opens up a big market for customers. It used to be that you had to have a seamless smart home system. Now it’s more, we bought this one, we bought that one, and they can talk to each other.
Matt Graham, Marketing Director of Global Food and Nutrition, Mars
AI in the home around appliances in our food and nutrition business is huge. If you think about the integration of technology into televisions, technology into refrigerators, microwaves and how you can actually start to use AI to inform our people to eat better and create recipes and everything else with what’s in their fridge, it’s huge, and how you can bring that back through conversion, I think it’s exciting.
Likewise, I think the evolution of wearable devices, the data we can get and how we connect it to human health and the role that diet can play in that is also very exciting.
Dani Mariano, President, Razorfish
This year, CES was a very well-attended event. It will be interesting to see the numbers. C-Space was crowded and very difficult to move around. This shows how important this event is to marketers, partners and events happening elsewhere. the exhibition hall.
It becomes a place for people to start the yearfrom the perspective of the client, the agency and the media, next to the trade show. All marketing is now digital, and this is therefore becoming an essential place to kick off the marketing year at a technology show.
A lot of the stuff we’ve been tracking over the past eight years can be found here. As with IoT, we struggled trying to do it ourselves, but now it’s real. Operating systems in cars, we won’t see it for a few years, but it’s very tangible. Same with XR and health technologies.
With AI, some of them were more legitimate, useful and ethical. Some brands are doing deep integration with AI, instead of just hiding the fact that they’re using AI in the background.
Mark Penn, CEO and President of Stagwell
CES has become more relevant to marketers. At the time, this was more limited to the tech companies themselves and their potential consumers and partners. Marketers then kind of saw that as something that they should look to to keep up with what was going on. Today, there are more marketers here than ever. I don’t know yet if it’s the American Cannes, but it’s close.
Agentic AI, one of the major themes of CES this year, is a cornerstone of the brand of the future. If you think of a brand as having a word mark, logo or sound element, all brands will now also have an agent. An AI-created personality that represents the brand will be routine, and this personality must be created and imagined. It was not born. You don’t want it to be the voice of The Forbin project or something like that, you want it to represent your company’s personality and values. You don’t want to take products off the shelf and make your business look like every other business, especially if you’re a large company with a brand personality. It will now be represented through technology.
Sir Martin Sorrell, Chairman of S4 Capital
These are the usual things. These are the screens. I was reading, John Deere has autonomous tractors. Last night a guy from AutoX told me [they are] will have a self-driving car. They have an experiment underway in San Jose, funded by SoftBank. They have raised a billion dollars and will have a self-driving car by 2026. They are already operating cars in San Jose. So it’s going to be big. And the progress in medicine is also enormous: to cure diseases, cancer, etc.
