The world’s largest consumer electronics show went off without a hitch last week. Not on the Las Vegas strip as it has for decades, but on screens across the world. And people showed up, despite the virtual nature of this year’s event, with over 150,000 virtual attendees (although exhibitors fell from 4,500 to 1,800 year over year).
Exhibits ran the gamut from education to eSports, with this year focusing heavily on tech’s response to Covid-19. While there is plenty to blow your mind across the board, we’re focusing on the trends and news that are most relevant to marketers, brand managers and creators.
Keeping Events Virtual: The elephant in the Zoom room from this year’s show is that the whole thing was, of course, virtual. For brands that are used to driving business through in-person events, 2021 will continue to be a year of adaptation. Luckily, we’re getting better at recreating the in-person feel of events and also finding entirely new ways to interact.
On a panel discussing consumer trends in next-generation technology, the CMO of Visible (owned by Verizon) discussed how they’re blending virtual and in-person components to create and market hits like their 3-day music festival that drew 9 million people during the pandemic.
Selling to Robots: It wouldn’t be CES without some stuff that is slightly unsettling, and this robot sommelier that brings you wine and does your dishes is one of them for me.
As a marketer, how can you work in tandem with this little guy to grow your brand? Robots will increasingly be making purchasing decisions - based on loose guidelines - for items like wine and kitchen cleaners. If at the end of the month a customer says to their Samsung WineBot, “I’d like a case of six reds for no more than $100 that includes at least one dry from Spain,” how are you going to show up in its list of possible options? It’s time to start brainstorming.
Winning Back Trust: The average person isn’t writing love letters to big tech companies right now. And, in some cases, the ill-will has spilled over into large corporate brands as a whole. Much of CES 2021 centered around efforts to reengage with consumers in a way that fosters trust, while continuing to push innovation forward.
Wednesday featured a panel with the Chief Privacy Officers of Google, Twitter and Amazon that discussed these efforts, which included committing to policy changes and giving people more control over what algorithms they are subjected to. These companies, along with Facebook and Netflix, will need to double down on brand messaging and storytelling that showcases their revamped privacy policies and commitment to protecting their customer’s information.
Augmented Reality Shopping Experiences: More customers are becoming comfortable virtually trying on clothes and taking immersive, virtual looks at products before deciding if they want to make a purchase, and some brands have been especially quick to move on this trend. Talk about timely. One example from this year’s conference is a startup called Perfect that debuted its YouCam product that allows for virtually trying beauty products to find the perfect mix. L’Oreal is another brand that is leaning heavily into AR-enabled shopping experiences. As these tools go mainstream, experiential marketers and enterprising content marketers will find new ways to earn and keep people’s attention.
Shifts in Retail Spending: In a Tuesday session, the CEO of Coresight Research put forth her thoughts on retail trends in 2021. One of the biggest shifts will be where people are spending their money. As restaurants, bars and more reopen, spending will partially shift back to brick-and-mortar, as people long to get back to their favorite places. The other shift will be towards health and wellness categories like bicycles, nutrition, and mental health, which are going to receive lots of attention over the next year. As marketers fight for consumer dollars coming out of the pandemic, they should consider partnerships that offer value for their communities in health and wellness verticals, and a shift towards messaging that emphasizes these qualities in their target customer.
Streamers will Face More Competition and Slowing Demand in 2021: 2020 was the greatest year in history if you were a video streaming company that didn’t rhyme with Libby. Brands like Netflix saw their largest quarterly subscriber increases ever during the first stages of the pandemic, but have since seen slowing subscriber growth. Everyday there is a new entrant to the streaming space and right now the attention is on Discovery+, which is targeting Disney+ as its main competitor.
See anything that you’re excited about as a marketer or creator this year? Let us know in the comments!
