Day 3 Recap at #CES2014 by Ogilvy

1. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 3

2. 2014
International
CES
1
recap
Day 3
The March of
progress
Humans are driven toward progress, toward changing our environment, and the smart home
will simplify our domestic lives, like the vacuum cleaner and the light bulb did about a century
ago. We won’t have to think about turning on the lights, preheating the oven, or minding our
shopping list, and that will free up our time. Past reductions in domestic workload had profound
effects on society. What social changes will the smart home engender? The smart home is
inevitable. It is possible, and since it is, it will happen. It just won’t be next week. The experts
think the smart home is around a decade into the future. Today’s point products, each controlled
by it’s own app or interface will soon start to work together in little clumps, connected by third
party software. Eventually, standards will develop or default technologies will emerge. Then the
smart home will be plug-and-play, and that’s the point at which real mass adoption will occur.
The user experience will be simple and attractive, just like a smartphone and the home will go
from being smart to being conscious. A conscious home can incorporate the data from the whole
sensor net surrounding you, learning to react to your behavior and patterns in context. Just
imagine all the data that will throw off.

3. 2014
International
CES
2
recap
Day 3
Infobesity
It’s ok to love data, but we’re loving it a little too much. We’ve got campaign and marketing
data, social listening, and now here comes a buffet of biometric and intimate data from
wearables, connected devices and cars, smarter homes and everything else that has an input
and an output. We’ll all need to loosen our belts a notch or two, but real infobesity is bad for
your corporate health. Stop and think about what kind of data you really need based on the
goals you—and your marketers, IT pros, analysts, and product managers—want to achieve.

4. 2014
International
CES
3
recap
Day 3
Data
choices
We need to be conscious of more than just the quantity of data we ingest. We will soon
need to be quite sensitive to what we do with it. It’s one thing to send the wrong message
to someone—the 50 year old male who gets a tampon ad on his fantasy baseball site is
just going to ignore your message with no harm done. But just as the consequences of
marketing missteps are amplified in social, the fallout from data disasters will become
toxic. Mishandling a customer’s web data is bad; mishandling their intimate personal
and biometric data is egregious. Consumers resent having to think about data privacy,
but marketers, manufacturers, and consumers need to come to a consensus on what is an
appropriate level of data sharing. Wall it off too much and the real promise of a connected
life will always remain a promise. Open it up to much, and your house may turn into Clippy
on acid: “According to your smart wristband, you’re getting busy. Would you like to sample
the greatest hits of Barry White?”

5. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 3
Investments
gone wild
4
We can learn a thing or two from the venture capitalist culture. Not every investment that a
VC makes will pan out. Companies fail, markets are smaller than anticipated, founders screw
up. So what makes a successful investment? Yoav Tzruya of Jerusalem Venture Partners
believes that it’s as basic as this: a successful investment is an investment in differentiated
technology that is sustainable in the long run. Whenever Tzruya found himself with a failed
investment, he found that even though the startup may have shown initial traction in the
marketplace, he could not explain why. We should be wary of the same phenomenon. We
should ask ourselves Tzruya’s question. Why will your startup, your product or your brand
be better than the competition—now and in the future? And if you can’t answer that, figure it
out or pack your bags and go home.

6. 2014
International
CES
5
recap
Day 3
sexism
Here’s another question: Why is rampant sexism still ok at CES? Doc Brown reappeared for
a promotion at Gibson, but did the rest of CES get sent with Marty back to 1955? The people
walking the show floor are still overwhelmingly male—that’s a problem right there, but
it is larger than just CES itself—and the exhibitors pander to them with sex. A phone case
manufacturer gave away bags decorated with a nude female silhouette and the words, “Don’t
let your phone go naked.” A camera maker which will go nameless surrounded a trophy car
with pouty, alluring models just so that convention goers could try out the camera. There was
a good crowd of guys snapping photos. It may have worked, but was it right? Booth after
booth was staffed by models in coordinated, revealing outfits ostensibly there to demonstrate
the product. Few of them knew much about the products; they were there as part of the
booth’s decoration. The problem didn’t vanish once you walked out the doors of the exhibit
hall. Many of the panels had only one woman on them, often sitting in the center, and just as
often getting ignored or even talked over. A cab driver heading over to the show on opening
day brought it all into focus with one line, “Man, CES must be crazy. It’s the only show where
they have to import strippers from LA.”