What happened in Vegas comes home from Vegas…
This week tens of thousands of tech and Media nerds swarmed Las Vegas for CES, The Consumer Electronics Show. But for many, this was actually a Consumer Entertainment Show.
CES is now as much (or more) of a Media conference as it is a Tech show, because Tech and Media are merging into one ecosystem - represented by my Global Media Ecosystem below.
Truth is, many of us who took up hotel rooms and ate way too much wagyu beef spent the entirety of our CES focused on the intersection of tech and Media. Most people I know in Vegas never even ventured to the convention floor to see the new tech on display. We spent nearly all our time on the strip at panels, keynotes, lunches and dinners, listening to tech companies talking about Media, and Media companies talking about tech.
Yes, there was a mountain of new tech unveiled at the convention - some of which may even reach consumers someday. The Heathtech and Autotech sectors managed to create significant buzz and meaningful conversation about how tech will advance the user experience in each field. And, extending a year-long trend, AI tech served an overexposed slot machine full of buzzwords.
However, through the particular prism of Media professionals: We’ve replaced the pretense of #CES as a device-led event with an accepted reality that we’re here to talk about how tech changes, advances, and competes with Media.
More than that, especially these last two years, CES offers a moment at the start of the year for those of us in tech and Media to gather in less formal spaces (aka Vegas) to compare notes on what’s actually happening in the new ecosystem we now share.
The coincidence of Amazon, Google, and NBCUniversal ALL announcing layoffs during CES was not lost on those of us at CES. Nor was Apple’s bad week on Wall Street coinciding with the public auction for Paramount.
If anyone needed evidence of the newly joined fates of entertainment and tech, these last four days (in and away from Vegas) offered ample doses of it.
Whether talking to OEMs, mobile players, streaming platforms, programmers, ad buyers or ad sellers, content or tech folks, CES made one thing abundantly clear: No one has much of anything entirely figure out right now.
Each year, CES sets the agenda in tech and Media. This year, as it has for many years, CES epitomized the intertwining of Media and tech at the very heart of the User-Centric Era.
Many attendees in Vegas grappled this week with how to create a new normal in a universe where Media and tech are collaborgators of convenience. And the similarities between the two industries and communities on display this week at CES (good AND bad) will likely be more far important to both sectors than any new hardware innovations demonstrated on the convention floor.
My FULL recap of #ces2024 is here: https://lnkd.in/ecCCD3w2
Interim VP of Defense Services at Skylight | USAF Veteran | MBA
3moAwesome!!