Aiming To Stand Out In A Gadget Paradise
PATRICK SEITZ Investor's Business Daily
Jan 25, 2008 09:44 EST
With more than 2,700 companies jostling to get noticed at the humongous
Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas, many found it hard to get heard above the din.
But a good number succeeded in getting upbeat media coverage and making a positive impact with reporters and bloggers.
Those players offer good lessons for all companies interested in making a splash at trade shows. On the flip side, the same goes for companies that struck out with the media or got bad coverage.
With more than 130,000 attendees, CES is the largest trade show of any kind in the U.S. It was held this year from Jan. 7-10 and lured more than 4,500 print, online and broadcast journalists.
Dolby Laboratories DLB, iRobot IRBT, Philips Electronics PHG, Pioneer, Shure and Sony SNE were among the firms that scored with the media at CES thanks to compelling product run-throughs and innovation, reporters and analysts say.
Small Is Good
Companies that did it right at the show tended to have smaller, more focused presentations, says David Carnoy, executive editor at CNet Networks CNET.
Companies at CES should take some pointers from master showman Apple AAPL, which grabs major media attention with its Macworld announcements.
"Everybody should be trying for that iPhone moment -- something that people walk away from and say, 'That is frickin' great,'" said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group.
Press and analysts need to take away something solid from press briefings and exhibits, whether that's a hot new product or technology or future concept. Too many companies get lost in cliches and marketing speak.
"That's when it starts reeking of B.S.," Carnoy said.
Dolby drew crowds to its exhibit with a full-size model of "Transformers" movie robot Bumblebee. That stressed the audio company's move into the visual side of cinema and home theater.
It then offered a compelling demonstration of a new technology that dramatically enhances image contrast for darker blacks and richer colors on high-definition LCD TVs that use LED backlighting. It used a side-by-side comparison of one TV with the technology and one without.
Pioneer had a similarly impressive run-through of extreme contrast technology for plasma TV sets, Carnoy says.
Household robot maker iRobot used its relatively small exhibit space to the fullest by featuring its robots in action. The company demonstrated its Roomba floor-vacuuming robot, Scoomba floor-washing robot and its new Looj robot for cleaning leaves and gunk from gutters.
Philips stuck to its familiar theme of "Sense and Simplicity" and scored points for its focus on fashion and design. Its CES press conference featured a clip from a short movie it commissioned from Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai to promote its Aurea high-definition LCD TV.
Philips also won CNet's best of CES award for its Eco TV, an energy-saving high-def LCD television.
"That's a good marketing tack for them to take," Carnoy said. "Going forward you'll see more companies talk about how much energy their products use. So they're slightly ahead of the game on that."
Audio gear maker Shure showed that smaller companies can make a splash at CES too. The maker of high-quality headphones and microphones held a "golden ear" competition in its booth. It challenged the press and others to try to pick out the best quality recordings among various audio files.
Hits And Misses
"That was fun," Carnoy said. "Any time you have something that's more interactive, it's good."
Sony won laurels for various innovative products. But it made the biggest impact with its organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, televisions.
Sony announced that its ultra-thin OLED TV with an 11-inch screen had started selling in the U.S. for $2,500. OLED TVs have much higher contrast and color saturation compared with LCD and plasma TVs. Sony's first commercial OLED TV is only 3 millimeters thick. That's the same depth as three stacked credit cards.
Sony "managed to turn some heads" with its XEL-1 television, said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "It was the type of product that gave Sony some bragging rights. It's clearly not meant as a mass market item. ... It allowed them to paint where the future is heading and generate some excitement in years to come."
Sony also showed off a 27-inch prototype OLED TV at its booth.
Samsung missed an opportunity to outshine Sony at the show with its own OLED TVs, analysts say. Samsung showed 14-inch and 31-inch prototype OLED TVs at its booth, but didn't mention them at its press conference the day before CES opened.
The biggest losers at the show were Toshiba and its HD DVD high-definition movie disc format. Instead of putting on a brave face and vowing to fight on against competing format Blu-ray Disc, Toshiba and its partners "just rolled over," Enderle said. "They threw in the towel. I don't think they're going to recover."
The HD DVD booth was a morgue compared with the nearby Blu-ray booth, which had a lot of traffic, Enderle says.
Mitsubishi laid an egg with its Laser TV rollout. The company was sketchy on details about pricing and product availability for the new type of projection television. To make up for the lack of details, it put on a flashy press event at the Moon Nightclub at The Palms Hotel, complete with dancing girls, strobe lights, loud music and fake smoke, says Marjorie Costello, editor and publisher of Consumer Electronics Online News.
Companies presenting at CES need a better understanding of how the news business works, Carnoy says.
For consumer electronics products, there's a definite cycle now where online news sites like CNet, Engadget and others post about products when they're announced and when they become available, followed by product reviews, he says.
The big companies at CES should save some "wow products" for the show, even if they're just slick prototypes, Carnoy says.
The keynote speeches from executives of Microsoft MSFT, Panasonic, Yahoo YHOO and others were particularly lacking in big news at the show, he says.
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Investor's Business Daily
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