ADWEEK is observe the razorfish at CES this week. Follow us for more behind-the-scenes reports from the event.
The Consumer Electronics Show showcases the latest technologies around the world at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Flying cars, smart glasses, haptic suits, bigger and better TV screens, and endless things. AI use cases abound.
But for marketers, this flashy technology is only part of the show.
Much of the advertising and marketing industry’s official CES programming is clustered two miles south in the Aria’s C-Space, where brands, agencies and platforms host back-to-back meetings with current and potential customers.
When agencies go to the convention center, it’s to help their clients with trade show exhibits or to show current and potential clients what’s hot and what trends they should be looking for.
The challenge is to narrow down CES’s sprawling exposure of emerging technologies to the most essential things advertisers need to know.
“There are a lot of things here that have nothing to do with marketing or advertising,” says Dani Mariano, president of the Razorfish agency. “We have to look for things that we think will have an impact versus what is simply [generally] interesting.”
Supporting technology clients in the field
Two Razorfish clients, Bread Financial and Samsung, are exhibiting at this year’s show.
Bread Financial has 12 CES attendees focused on setting up its booth, and Razorfish’s role is to serve as a show guide. Razorfish has been working with Bread, formerly Alliance Data Systems, since 2021.
“[Razorfish is] really great at getting things done for us, [highlighting] which would be meaningful to us based on the relationship,” said Jenny Hogan, senior director and head of DTC and channel marketing at Bread Financial.
For example, Razorfish held a pre-show meeting with CNET’s Brian Cooley to give Hogan and other patrons a lay of the land. Razorfish then took a tour with Pinterest, where Bread already spends advertising money.
Razorfish’s other customer, Samsung, has a massive activation at CES laying out its vision for how agentic AI simplifies its vision of a secure, connected home. Razorfish didn’t work the exhibit for Samsung this year, but Mariano’s team spent time looking around the vast display, as well as competitors like LG, to get a sense of how attendees would react.
“We are on the verge of another marketing transformation,” Mariano said. “[Using] To achieve personalization and analyze the massive amounts of data sets we have, AI needs to have the right system.
Organize the living room
During a visit with Pinterest on Wednesday, Razorfish customers from the entertainment, health and media industries browsed the connected home and health technology exhibits at the Venetian Expo.
One entertainment space customer said that while most of her time at CES is spent meeting potential new partners on the Las Vegas Strip, spending two hours roaming the floor allows her to “keep her finger on the pulse.” the pulse just to know what can happen next.” in the art of the possible.
“There is a lot of noise and I think it can be difficult to find the signal,” added another Razorfish media customer. “That’s where floor tours are really helpful, because someone’s doing a little curation for you, they’re giving you a little bit of context, and that’s really helpful.”
One of the main focuses of the tour was connected AI ecosystems powered by Matteran open standard for smart home technology that connects ecosystems. Google, Amazon, Samsung and AI chip makers are adopting the protocol to make it easy for consumers to connect their smart device ecosystems, regardless of who owns the hardware or software.
However, this promise of a connected ecosystem raises questions about the power dynamics over which companies will hold the space, said a media marketing executive present at the tour.
“How can we bring everyone to the same standards? » he said. “The way companies are trying to combat this, either by making the products themselves, from the chip to the final product, or by trying to develop their own standard to push people to do it, or by having more of an open system in which any technology can work, it’s quite fascinating.
The tour also focused on health technology. With protocols like Matter, for example, a consumer’s smart refrigerator could connect to their wearable device to create a personalized diet and workout program accessible on their smart TV. This biometric information can then be seamlessly sent back to their healthcare provider.
From a marketing perspective, the amount of data collected through these devices has real implications. For example, during a visit to Govee, a connected smart home company, the guide explained how its technology connects to major retailers. like Home Depot and Walmart, and could potentially provide data that will inform their retail media networks.
Questions that provoke the future
For the media marketing executive, the tour raised questions “not only about the applications of this technology, but also about its implications from a cultural perspective,” he said.
“There’s no denying that big language patterns have an impact,” the person said. Especially as many AI models begin to interact with each other, “it opens up some really interesting possibilities,” he added.
But it also raises difficult questions about bias, which are often not addressed in the salon setup. These issues include the ethical sourcing of AI, the fair treatment of creators whose job it is to train large language models, brand safety, and the impact of AI on mental health.
“This idea of diversity sometimes gets lost, but these are things that I would like to see tech wrestle with a little more and be a little more transparent,” he said.
