CES Confident Its New Badging System Will Make for Shorter Lines

When CES showgoers arrive in Las Vegas and visit a badge pickup station, they'll scan the QR code on the confirmation emails they receive with their registrations and “a badge will immediately print out for them,” said Karen Chupka, CEA senior vice president-CES and corporate business strategy. “They'll be able to pick it up right there, pick up a lanyard, and go,” Chupka told us in an interview.

The pickup stations will have kiosks that are “somewhat self-service, though there will be people there to assist if there are issues,” Chupka said. “Just like at the airport.” Attendants at the kiosks will help showgoers who have forgotten to bring their confirmation emails find their accounts, and also to check photo IDs for all who have badges printed out, she said. CEA plans closer to CES to email show registrants reminder confirmations with their QR codes “so it’s at the top of their email chain” when they depart for Las Vegas, she said. The QR codes also can be scanned from a smartphone, she said.

CES typically opens show registrations in July, but CES conference registrations don’t open until October, Chupka said. In past years, “if I registered for the show and then later went in and added conferences for the show, I may have gotten two badges [in the mail] or perhaps even a third if I updated conferences,” she said. “And so by the time I headed off for the show, I may not have known which badge was first, and grabbed the wrong badge that didn’t have all the right coding in it.” The new system automatically updates an attendee’s record as soon as conferences are added to the account, she said. “So when they print that badge out, it will have their most updated information already entered in,” she said. No longer will attendees need to worry about being turned away from conferences they paid for because they took the wrong badge to Las Vegas, she said.

That’s one rationale for not mailing out the badges, Chupka said. Another was to make for a much greener CES, Chupka said. Typically, nearly half of those who preregister for CES don’t actually attend the show, she said. In past years, this meant that roughly 100,000 badges were printed and mailed unnecessarily, she said. This in addition to the those who also forgot their badges and had to have them reprinted, she said. To date, CES customer service reps have fielded very few calls or complaints from show attendees who may have been concerned about not getting their badges in the mail, she said. Most of the queries pertaining to the new CES badges have been to ask where the pickup stations will be located and when they will be operational, she said.

Badge pickup stations open as early as Jan. 2 at three locations in and around the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), CEA said. Two locations at McCarran airport open beginning at noon on Jan. 3, it said. Pickup stations at 10 Las Vegas hotels open beginning at 8 a.m. on Jan. 5. In all, there will be 24 pickup stations to choose from when all are fully operational on Jan. 5, CEA said. Additionally, there will be onsite registration counters at the LVCC, the Las Vegas Hilon Hotel ballroom and the Venetian Hotel that open beginning at noon on Jan. 6, CEA said. CES officially opens Jan. 7 for a four-day run.

CEA believes the new badging system will reduce the long registration lines that have plagued past CES events, particularly those lines in front of the LVCC on the show’s opening morning, Chupka said. Many of the showgoers on those lines hadn’t realized they could have picked up their badge holders elsewhere, “and so they were coming on site and waiting at these badge holder kiosks,” she said. The badge holder stations now become “badge-producing sites, and so we just have a lot more capabilities and a lot more locations where people can go and have their badges taken care of,” she said.

CEA chose the vendor for the project, ITN International, about a year ago because it wanted the contractor to be up and running with the new system by July, which is when CEA typically starts sending out its CES alumni registration notices, Chupka said. Though the January show will be ITN’s first CES, CEA hired the firm to generate badges for its Digital Patriots dinner in the spring and last month’s CEA Industry Forum in Los Angeles, Chupka said.

The NFC technology in the badges will bear immediate benefits, Chupka said. For example, in the past, CES conference partners needed to issue paid attendees separate printed vouchers redeemable for a free bag or other perk, she said. That vouchering system “now goes away because it all becomes part of the badge itself, and as you tap that badge, the information is already uploaded as to whether you're eligible or not to get that” perk, she said. NFC promises much speedier entrances to CES conferences and workshops because it’s a “touch-and-go” technology that doesn’t require magnetic-striped cards to be swiped as was done at past shows, often with many delays, she said.

"On the transaction side,” NFC will afford “nice” benefits for exhibitors when it comes to sales “lead retrievals,” Chupka said. Each CES exhibitor will get a “special software license” that they can upload to their smartphone or tablet “to start collecting leads from people anywhere within the booth,” she said. “It gives exhibitors a little bit more capability about collecting information from people who are coming into their booth, and allows them to customize that experience a little more about how they do want to follow up."

CES will be the largest trade event ITN has ever worked, its CEO, Ivan Lazarev, told us in an interview. But “I know big shows,” Lasarev said. “I've done big shows all my life.” To ITN, when it came to upscaling for CES the technology that has worked well for smaller shows, “the approach was very simple,” he said. “When you look at CES, what you're really looking at is four different shows, because you always have to relate it back to the venues.” That’s because CES is comprised of exhibits at the LVCC, the LVH, Mandalay Bay and the Venetian, he said. “We've run shows at the LVCC. We've run sizable shows at the Mandalay Bay, sizable shows at the Venetian, so we're very, very familiar with all these venues.” ITN has “very efficient check-in mechanisms that allow us to deploy our solution very easily in multiple locations,” he said.

To land its two-year contract with CES, ITN needed to show CEA “what our technology does and how easy it is to produce a credential on demand for people checking in,” Lasarev said. “And we went away from mailing 250,000 badges. That’s the big thing. That’s the big, big difference. When you think about it, what makes the show really tough to handle, is when you have to mail 250,000 badges, that requires a big infrastructure. But we never had to worry about that. We sold CES on the concept that it’s all about check-in. It’s all about the airport approach. That’s essentially what we're doing."

To work CES, ITN has “mirrored the amount of equipment and the amount of badge production areas that were used” at the last show, Lasarev said. “We then have completely exploded the number of additional locations that are being provided this year as opposed to last year. So last year, if you had your badge in the mail, you would go to a badge holder counter. Everywhere there was a badge holder counter, we now have badge printers. We are issuing an NFC-enabled badge at every one of those locations. So literally what we decided to do is we decided to completely mirror the infrastructure that we know can handle the volume of CES. Instead of badge holder clerks, we now have badge printer clerks. And we actually added more equipment, just to be on the safe side.” ITN has modeled to successfully work a show that’s twice as large as CES, Lasarev said. “Literally, we could do a 300,000-people show."

ITN as a company is “very big on flow management,” Lazarev said. “If you manage the flow right, you can handle a lot, a lot of people. And so we've worked very well with the operations team at CES, and we have been able to design the registration areas, design the flows, in such a way that we're very comfortable about how we're going about this.” That’s why to help manage that flow, the badge pickup locations are reserved for preregistrants and will be “absolutely” off limits to those trying to register onsite for the first time, Lazarev said. Onsite registrants have two choices, he said: (1) Registering online at cesweb.org using a tablet or smartphone and generating a confirmation email with QR code that can then be scanned at any badge pickup station; or (2) Going to the regular onsite registration counters at the LVCC, the LVH or the Venetian.

At CES, the average paper badge with an NFC chip embedded in it will print out in about five seconds, he said. The chip “gets encoded with all the information pertinent to the attendee,” he said. “So that becomes a very, very important piece of digital media that’s included on the paper badge. It’s completely embedded inside the printer so there are no additional steps required to be able to produce that credential.” Unique to CES for ITN will be attaching a color-coded “coaster” to each badge to signify an attendee’s classification, adapting the color-coding system CES has used for years, he said. “We attach it with a two-clip lanyard, and off they go. It’s a very quick process, a very efficient process.” The technology of embedding an NFC chip on a paper badge is still very new, Lazarev said. He estimated it has been in commercial use for only about 18 months. Still, the technology is tried and tested and has worked as advertised at other trade shows ITN has serviced, he said. “We've done it before,” he said. “We didn’t want CES to be the guinea pig, right?”