Alexa Archives - The Drew Blog

If you’ve ever attended Consumer Electronics Show (CES) then you know it is a beast of a show with more than 4,000 exhibiting companies and covering the 2.6 million square feet of exhibit space is next to impossible especially as you are fighting through crowds of 170,000+. It might sound too overwhelming but having attended regularly since 1988 and as a marketer hoping to spot trends, I can assure you it is always worth the trouble. Inevitably, I leave CES with some new ideas, at least one new friend and a dousing of Vegas silliness.

With the 2018 CES right around the corner (Jan 8-11, 2018), I thought it would be helpful and interesting to record a special episode with the legendary tech guru Shelly Palmer. I first met Shelly back in 2010 (when I wrote about him as the prototypical personal brand on FastCompany.com) and have spotted his ubiquitous signs at CES ever since. [Blatant unpaid plug — if you are new to CES, have a limited time frame or just want to make sure you don’t miss the big trends while you’re in Vegas, then you’d be wise to sign up for a tour of the show by Shelly and his team at The Palmer Group.] As for my earlier point about Shelly being interesting to talk to, he didn’t disappoint!

In the podcast, we discuss why he’s excited about this year’s show and why expects to see more evolutionary products than revolutionary ones. We dive into hot topics like drones, cars, VR and AI among others. You’ll also hear Shelly school me on why I’m wrong to call Alexa (Amazon voice activation system) dumb just because she can’t infer the request Dear Evan Hansen from Evan Hansen when a Google search does that handily! The tech challenge aside, I still think she has some cognitive development work ahead of her! You can listen to the special episode here.

Here are a few other highlights from the interview:

Drew: What should marketers be paying attention to at this year’s CES?

Shelly: This year at CES, we’re going to have a really good look at integrations between the natural language understanding tools and the physical world. I’m pretty sure you’re going to see a lot of augmented reality because that is the toolset that is most flexible. You need great programming skills but it also yields amazing benefits – everything from a doctor looking into an incubator and seeing a heads-up display of all of the vital signs of the patient to gameplay and 100% of everything in the middle. You’ll see a lot of augmented reality. Drones and machine learning. Drones are now self-flying for the most part and there’s a bunch of companies who have taken to creating machines that not only fly themselves but with either high definition or 4k cameras in them and in some cases 8k cameras in them. And in some cases infrared cameras in them. They’re doing materials processing in the air. They can look at an insurance company like Travelers, who are the number one user of drones in the United States, and put a drone up in the air to look at the exterior damage. They can understand what happened to your roof in the air and file and process your claim without having someone go out to your house. When you think about a hurricane like we’ve had and the ability to quickly process and quickly get people the help they need who are insured, you’ll see a lot of that at CES. A lot of drone companies showing off their ability to have not only self-flying drones, but drones that can carry bigger payloads, can take better cameras with them, and fly in inclement weather or in adverse conditions that you wouldn’t have seen before. The drone story is going to be pretty big.

Drew: What else is going to be big?

Shelly: The cars are going to be out in force – driver assistance of every kind. Autonomy is coming. There’s never a lack of cool cars at CES. It’s more fun than the auto show because for us who are all semi-geeks about the technology, they come and they put their tech foot forward as opposed to their design foot forward or this guy with 500 horsepower or whatever. You’re going to see great TVs, but we haven’t had a year with a bad TV in 20 years. Let me tell you about the TVs. I can tell you I haven’t seen them yet. Let me tell exactly what I’m going to say when I get to stand in front of any TV; it’s bigger. It’s thinner. It’s got a brighter picture, higher dynamic range, wider color gamut, bigger screen, thinner. That’s sort of the joke at CES. It used to be a TV show. Now the TVs just get better.

Drew: Is there anything new that’s coming to CES?

Shelly: What you will see this year that you haven’t seen so much before is how well integrated the home is becoming. Honestly, it is Alexa’s voice services and all of NLP systems that have caused this. Because if you think about it, when you walk in the house you have to open an app, tap a couple of buttons, open another app, and press a couple more buttons. It’s like, “Oh come on, stop it! I’ll just turn the light switch on.” But now you walk in and you say, “Alexa, lights on. Alexa, daytime scene.” Whatever you want. And boom, the house is set. The value proposition for consumers is so great. Everybody’s jumping on that. Look for integrations in ways you’ve never seen them.

When the mighty Alex Rodriguez watched the final strike whiz by him it was a fitting end to a pathetic performance by the most successful franchise in the history of professional sports. The unheralded Texas Rangers had not just beaten the Yankees, they had demolished them on every front, a fact that made me exceedingly cranky while attending several recent social media conferences.

Stewing in defeat as a sub-par speaker droned on, my mind drifted back to the Rangers, wondering how this particular collection of players managed to out-hit, out-steal, out-field, out-pitch and even out-fun the nearly immortal Yanks. It didn’t take long to conclude once again that payroll alone does not determine outcome, that coaching, chemistry and clutch performances by both stars and unheralded newbies carry the day whether you’re on the field or at the podium.

Conference Organizers Must Coach the Presenters

In their series against the Yanks, the Rangers manager played “small ball” to perfection, stealing and bunting runners into scoring position at every opportunity. This was undoubtedly the result of careful coaching long before the big games. Conference organizers take note. If you aren’t holding highly structured advanced calls with your panelists and speakers, the quality of the output will suffer dramatically.

Speakers need to be coached, given tight limits on the quantity of slides and told in advance the kinds of questions they might be asked by the moderator. Importantly, there needs to be a moderator, who can cut off the windbags before they ruin it for the rest, keeping the conversation moving and summarizing the results at the end of the panel. Without these things the audience will drift away, checking email or worse yet complaining to others via their Twitter feeds.

Chemistry Matters

In their victorious 2009 season, the Yanks were all giggles, with AJ Burnett using whipped cream to douse the daily hero. This year it was the Rangers who had all the fun, making a goofy antler sign with two fingers after each of their nine stolen bases. Their chemistry was particularly apparent in the dugout during the games and in their on-field victory celebration, when they sprayed each other with ginger ale not champagne out of respect for Josh Hamilton and his past struggles with alcoholism.

Some of the panel discussions I saw recently struck out, challenging drying paint as a major league soporific. The panelists seemed completely content to agree with each other and the overall energy was just plain foul. And while an enthusiastic moderator can liven things up, the organizers really needed to think through the topics of discussion, seeking opposing views as well as differing personality types to keep everyone including the audience on their toes.

Clutch Performances Carry the Day

In the recent American League Championship Series, the Texas Rangers out-hit the Yankees on all measures, scoring twice as many runs with a team batting average that was 103 points higher than vaunted Bronx Bombers. As expected superstar center fielder Josh Hamilton came through in the clutch as did many of his lesser-known teammates, including a rookie shortstop named Elvis who managed to get a hit in all six games.

At the recent Pivot Conference in New York City, clutch performances by a range of presenters from the always stunning Arianna Huffington to the erudite Doug Rushkoff, from the scholarly Kit Yarrow to a rookie named Alexa Scordato, carried the event over the top, distinguishing it from a host of also-rans. These presenters commanded your attention with both style and substance that entertained and enlightened, making one’s decision to leave the office a clear victory for all concerned.

Final note: Despite losing to the Giants in the World Series, they Rangers have left a mark on baseball, playing the roll of David to the Yankee Goliath. Bitter as I was, I couldn’t help be touched when the series MVB Josh Hamilton admitted shedding a tear of pure joy after the final out. To push this analogy just one step further, I only wish all conference organizers had this kind of heart, striving for the extraordinary even in the face of limited resources, doubling up on prep time long before the game’s afoot, insuring all attendees head home happy.

Tag: Alexa

Preparing for the 2018 CES