For fifty-four years, big and small hardware manufacturers that hoped to reach their target audiences rolled out new products at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The first CES event in June 1967 drew 17,500 attendees, where many in the crowd were absolutely dazzled by GE’s new 24-pound color television. In the intervening decades, the conference grew so much, it essentially created its own gravity. The last in-person CES held in 2020 attracted a total verified attendance of 171,268, according to organizers.
The trade show shifted to online-only in 2021, but CES returned last week, even though many exhibitors and publications (including this one) declined to send representatives, citing the ongoing omicron surge. “It’s time we return to making the world better rather than living in fear,” wrote Consumer Trade Association president and CEO Gary Shapiro in an opinion column.
But just 40,000 people attended, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. That’s a 75% decline.
If an event only attracts 25% of its usual crowd, for whom is it essential? Today, TechCrunch Transportation Editor Kirsten Korosec, Hardware Editor Brian Heater and reporter Haje Jan Kamps shared their thoughts on CES 2022:
- Kristin Korosec: CES hasn’t lost its automotive luster
- Brian Heater: Hardware startups should reconsider their media strategies
- Haje Jan Kamps: I missed it sorely this year
Kristin Korosec: CES hasn’t lost its automotive luster
Somewhere around 2014 or so, CES turned into a car show. And even with the latest variant of COVID derailing in-person plans for many companies, CES 2022 didn’t lose its automotive luster.
This year was different in a few respects, signaling that the automotive industry has taken a few cupfuls of we-really-need-revenue punch. Technology that is further away from commercialization showed up, but not in the same force as in previous years. CES 2022 was not the year for evtols, hyperloop, and to a lesser degree, autonomous vehicle technology.
Autonomous vehicle technology wasn’t absent from the show, and there were some key announcements and activities. A few of the notable ones included the head-to-head autonomous racecar competition at the Las Vegas Speedway, GM CEO Mary Barra’s intention to sell personal autonomous vehicles by mid-decade (although some key details were missing) and Intel subsidiary Mobileye’s plan to bring a new supercomputer to market designed to give passenger cars, trucks and SUVs autonomous driving powers. When automated driving did come up, it was often in the form of future promises, narrowly defined autonomous features like parking — or both.The Mobileye announcement points to one of the themes at CES 2022: compute.
The automotive chip game was on this year with Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm all making announcements. And there’s a reason why. Companies need processing power to unlock more capable advanced driver assistance systems as well as deliver new digital content and services via vehicle infotainment systems — the other two CES 2022 themes. Compute, ADAS — along with driver monitoring technology that supports the driver assistant — and in-vehicle content seemed to be everywhere.
Why? These are areas in which automakers can compete and earn revenue today — or at least in the near future. It also reflects the technological progress within automakers, all of which have been talking about over-the-air software updates and delivering services for years now in an effort to catch up with Tesla. It seems they’ve finally caught up. Finally, we’d be remiss not to mention electric vehicles and the EV chargers that will power them. They were everywhere: from ebikes and scooters to passenger cars and commercial vans.
EVs have shown up before, but in the past the vast majority were concepts meant to inspire images of a distant future. This year, we saw more EVs that were either available for consumers today or will be by 2023.
Brian Heater: Hardware startups should reconsider their media strategies
In the wake of an event whose attendance fell around 75% from two years prior, my best advice to startups is this: Use CES as an opportunity to rethink your news cycle. This event is designed to front-load the year with news – hardware companies announcing all of the products they’re readying for the next six to 12 months. Marrying yourself to such a cycle is a recipe for getting lost in the scrum among announcements from far larger companies with far bigger megaphones.
The weeks following CES have traditionally been a desert for hardware news. Fill that vacuum. Don’t marry your successes or failures to a singular event. Once CES is over, a few days after the event, the tech press is looking for the next big thing. Be that thing.
I’ve spent many an early-January tweet lamenting an upcoming CES. It’s a hard and exhausting show in a difficult location, and the timing sucks. But it’s always felt deeply ingrained in my job as an hardware editor. I’ve probably attended 15 or so CES (I’ve honestly lost track) and approached each one with equal parts dread and anticipation. When the event went fully virtual last year, I was honestly surprised that I missed the show a bit.
After a year away, I was genuinely excited to get back to Vegas this year. It’s a phrase I never thought I’d utter – but then again, I also never expected to be stuck in a one-bedroom apartment for two years straight. CES 2022 was set to be my first out-of-state travel since March 2020 – an opportunity to reenter the world, see some colleagues, visit the Wynn buffet and, yes, check out some new tech.
A few weeks ahead of the show, however, TechCrunch made the decision not to attend in-person. Living in New York City, I’ve seen the evidence of the omicron spike first-hand. We’ve seen the numbers and were well aware that the real impact of holiday travel wouldn’t be known until after CES wrapped. At the end of the day, the risks of attending such a large in-person show dramatically outweighed the benefits. And I am a strong believer that hardware events are far better in-person. CES 2021 was as good an argument for that viewpoint as any. Things weren’t helped along by went felt like a hastily thrown together virtual platform.
As someone who has been directly involved in the planning of dozens of events, I’m certainly sympathetic to the difficulties facing CTA in the lead up to this year’s show. You can read my thoughts on how their team handled the whole thing here. In the end, I think we – and other outlets – were able to do a fine job from afar. Press conferences are certainly easier to cover from the comfort of one’s own home, and companies were more than willing to discuss their news in advance of the show, with uncertainty looming over the event in the days and weeks prior.
Moving completely virtual wouldn’t be the worst thing for CES from a coverage perspective, but in the end, even with improvements to the show’s digital platform this year, discovery continues to be the major problem. And as a result, it’s startups who suffer the most. In the future, all events will have to be hybrid, even after this particular coronavirus strain is a distant memory. But event planners of the future will have to find a compelling method to ensure that smaller companies are more than just another pitch in a bottomless inbox.
Haje Jan Kamps: I missed it sorely this year
2022 marks what would have been my 15th CES, and covering it from afar has multiple flavors: some bitter, some sweet. Traditionally, covering CES in the city where dreams slump off to die means five or six days of clocking up 30,000 steps per day. Tired feet are accompanied by a steady diet of the worst coffee you can imagine, paired with ibuprofen and “food” that falls somewhere between “bio-hazard” and “barely fit for human consumption.” Vegas itself has an expiration date, and it is typically about 48 hours, tops. Six days is hell on earth.
Yet, CES, has a special place in my heart. The smoke-filled casinos that pipe in dubious music and over-oxyginated air aside, I’ve spent most of my career as an investor, journalist, or startup founder. Las Vegas during CES has become an annual pilgrimage, a reunion where I get to gently rib old competitors, enthusiastically drink with old friends, and bump into an ex-colleague or fifty.
To me, CES is walking the show floor at Eureka Park. That’s where all the hopeful startups hang out, eking out their very last marketing dollars in a desperate attempt for some press coverage, to find an investor, or perhaps a distribution deal. It is a slog where proverbial emotional wading boots are the only thing that stops your feet from getting wet from the ankle-deep stench of desperation.
And, damn it, I missed it sorely this year. I love talking with early-stage startups. Meandering through the too-narrow aisles between the minuscule, under-designed booths in Eureka Park is one of the only ways of doing that. Half the startups I spoke with this year found their way to me through PR agencies. That’s a tragedy; some of the most exciting conversations with startups happen long before the founders find the budget for public relations spend.
I’m excited about and proud of TechCrunch’s coverage of CES this year, but I genuinely hope that next year, it becomes possible for someone to tap me on the shoulder with a bright-eyed look of excitement, saying, “I simply have to show you this awesome thing I’m working on.” The hustle is real, and when I’m not building startups myself, the excitement fuels me. There’s something rare and wild about the obsession of startup founders. I grieve that I didn’t get to bask in that this year. Here’s to 2023.
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