Every January more than 170,000 people make their way to Las Vegas to check out some of the biggest developments the tech world has to offer. This is CES, the conference of all conferences, where the masterful and mad put their inventions on show in a bid to steal the world’s attention. Sifting out the credible from the crazy, we’ve brought back five ideas and inventions from the desert that could be game-changers for advertisers and brands.
1.LEG’s credit card thin OLED TV – There’s only so much space the average person can save by having a wafer-thin TV. However, ultra-thin, energy-efficient TVs mark the start of ‘visual wallpaper’, and will allow brands to wrap and roll communications around any surface.
2.Hover Camera Passport – This neatly-sized drone shoots in 4k and can follow you around to make sure you never miss a selfie opportunity. Creative Directors will be going queasy at the thought of marketers bringing these to shoots to get that vital social content, but the opportunities are too plentiful to pass up.
3.Fancy Fridges – Panasonic and Samsung both presented ‘smart’ fridges that, for the first time, seemed like an attractive purchase. The highlight was the Samsung fridge with an internal camera, allowing owners to remotely peek inside. It can read sell-by-dates and even re-order products when you’re running low on essentials, giving brands that are out of the fridge no chance of getting back in.
4.AI (Amazon Intelligence) – Amazon dominated CES by showcasing innovations that other tech brands can only dream of. Amazon’s voice-activated suite of hardware is rapidly partnering with tech companies. If they haven’t already, brands should seriously start to consider teaming up with Amazon and its impressive AI.
5.Non-tech brands do CES – Pernod Ricard, LEGO and L’Oreal invested heavily in this year’s CES, proving that even non-tech brands need to be a part of the growing tech conversation.
Many of these ideas may turn out to be all smoke and no fire, but even if none get further than the prototype stage, there were 600 or so exhibitors that didn’t make our shortlist. There’s a lot to look forward to in 2017.
