CES 2018 Mindshare Moved From Cars To Homes With Robots to Serve Us All
CES 2018 is a wrap. Right now everyone is returning to their normal days, nursing whatever bug they picked up from a week of frantic hand shaking across the petri dish of CES. Not only was I able to walk the show floor but we also collected every tweet and instagram post on the show. While in past years I have renamed CES as the Car Electronics Show with the heavy emphasis on Connect Car and Autonomous Vehicles, this year was dominated by Smart Home and Robotics.
Automotive, typically a dominant force for CES interest, fell to fifth place, even with BMW’s autonomous drift racing experience at the convention center. nVidia shifted away from a pure Automotive focus and showed off efforts in their core gaming as well as their continued leadership in Artificial Intelligence, keeping them in the top 10 most discussed brands in the show.
Virtual reality beat out Televisions and Gaming though LG’s forest of curved displays was one of the must experience booths on the show floor this year, the battle for VR/AR was more interesting to the world than bigger, curvier, 8K displays. Gaming is typically heavily tied with VR and Televisions and this year was no different with Gaming related announcements in displays, Gaming focused VR headsets and more. Drones and Smartphones rounded out the bottom of the segments that grabbed the most attention this year at CES.
Missing from list that have dominated years past were Wearables and Tablets. As these markets have matured, in the case of Tablets, and slowed, in the case of Wearables, new announcements are not driving as much attention. In many ways, this year was looking for the heroic story to drive engagement for the entire CE industry. CES is typically a tremendous array of technological “coulds” in which a few golden consumer “shoulds” are found. This year Smart Home attempted to take that prize. I’ll dive deeper on that within another blog post.
If you are interested to see how your market or your brand performed at CES this year (or even compared to last year) Argus Insights has the data. Just contact us at this link and I’d be glad to share what we know about your brands ability to grab mindshare this year from your competition.