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Here at Marketing Brew, we’re suckers for metaphors. And CES apparently serves as a pretty good one for the media industry as a whole.
“It’s at an inconvenient time, in an extremely inconvenient place that is incredibly hard to navigate, talking to lots of people with many, many different kinds of agendas,” Ben James, the chief innovation officer of the agency Gale, said. “But it can also be a lot of fun.”
And there is a lot of fun and hobnobbing to be had in Vegas this time of year—as well as the chance for marketers, agencies, and brands to pulse-check for the year ahead.
- The week “is really about setting the agenda,” Dan Robbins, Roku’s VP of marketing and partner solutions, told us. “Everybody is really trying to understand what comes next.”
What is next, though? For Roku and other streaming platforms, many of the pre-upfronts talks happening this week have been about the continued growth of streaming, which Robbins hopes can give the platform (and now TV manufacturer) a leg up.
“This upfront is going to be a really pivotal point where most brands are going to say, ‘I’m actually starting with streaming. And that is the first thing on my agenda, because that’s where the consumer is,’” Robbins said.
But wait…Due to questions about the 2023 economic outlook, some marketers are approaching any commitments cautiously, which “is having a cascading effect” down to pricing, Mastercard CMCO Raja Rajamannar said.
- “Unless you as a CMO know how much your CEO is going to let you spend, or your CFO let you spend, how are you going to commit?” He told us. “This is a sentiment I’m seeing across the industry…Given that there is a tentativeness in the industry, I think there’ll be better deals to be had.”
Not-so-next? The metaverse, which, to some attendees, felt a bit more like the meh-taverse this year. “The metaverse stalls have been, to me, a little underwhelming,” Rajamannar said, while Don McGuire, SVP and CMO of Qualcomm, cautioned that the metaverse is still “years off” from its prime-time moment.
Stat: 17.9 miles. The distance I walked around CES as of Friday morning, per my trusty Garmin watch.—KS