CEA Says Big Format Changes Will Make CES More Navigable Show
"Discover the new CES and register today,” beckoned CEA email promotions last week attempting to drum up midsummer enlistments for the 2015 show, which opens Jan. 6 for a four-day run. In reality, the substance of the Las Vegas show won’t change, but some of its layout and nomenclature will, said Karen Chupka, CEA senior vice president-events and conferences, in an interview.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
For 2015, said the promotional emails, “we're creating three unique locations -- CES Tech East, Tech West and the Aria -- to help tell the story of consumer technology, celebrate emerging trends and highlight new innovations.” Chupka said that Tech East will encompass all the exhibits and meeting rooms at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Renaissance Hotel and the newly renamed Westgate Las Vegas (formerly the LVH and before that the Las Vegas Hilton). Tech West will encompass display space and meeting rooms at the Sands Convention Center and the Venetian, Wynn and Encore hotels, Chupka said. The Aria Resort in the City Center complex on the Las Vegas Strip, just south of Harmon Ave., makes its debut as an official CES venue. Chupka conceded it’s too early to discuss how show signage will change to accommodate the new nomenclature.
As for the rationale for the changes, “one of the things we've been working on the past two years is how do we make the show easier to understand, to navigate, to move around?” she said. “What we started looking at is to try to simplify how we talk about things, how we name things.” One unfortunate byproduct of the exponential growth of CES in recent years was that “a lot of the technologies that were coming to the marketplace were being disbursed in so many different areas that it was hard for people to get around the show floor and see them,” Chupka said. “The intent of Tech West is to pull all of those new technologies together and put them all under one rooftop to make it easier for everybody to find them."
That means the more “traditional” exhibit categories like AV, gaming and automotive will dominate and be centralized in Tech East, Chupka said. As for Tech West, the Venetian will continue to house high-performance audio, “which has been there for many years,” she said. The Venetian also will continue to house companies that want private meeting space, though a chunk of that will be given over to hi-res audio for the first time, she said. Within Tech West, CES will make big use of the Sands, including an expanded Eureka Park section of entrepreneurial startups, as well as the sports technology marketplace and the smart watch, 3D printing, health and fitness, robotics and smart home sectors, she said. Eureka Park will feature 300 companies, a threefold increase from the 100 that exhibited at Eureka Park last year when it was housed on the lower level of the Venetian, she said. As in past years, the Wynn and Encore will continue housing companies that want private meeting space, she said.
CES 2015 will mark the first-time use of the Aria, Chupka said. It will house all the companies that are “trying to reach consumers through digital marketing,” she said. Though most Aria exhibitors will book suites, there also will be a meeting area there “to host smaller demos and tabletop displays,” she said. She estimated 30-50 companies will have “some type of demo or exhibit” at the Aria, home of the “C Space” sector of CES, so named for its focus on “how content, creativity and CMOs are all coming together to market and use technology,” she said. It’s a partnership with the Association of National Advertisers, which will produce “conference component” at the Aria each morning of the show, she said. Though logistical details have yet to be worked out, CEA plans dedicated shuttle service between the Aria and other parts of CES, she said.
CEA is “happy” with the new CES badging system that debuted at the 2014 show, Chupka said. CEA promised shorter registration lines and a sleeker show-going experience from new CES badges that packed near field communication technology onto a paper credential and relied on a check-in process that emulated that of airport kiosks (CED Nov 13 p8). Through the new system, CES officials said they hoped to reduce the waste and inefficiency of past shows when tens of thousands of badges were unnecessarily printed and mailed to people who preregistered for the show but didn’t attend.
In hindsight, “the thing we now have is better information about where people were picking up their badges,” Chupka said. “One change we can make this year is to staff better for areas that we saw had higher volume. So we have a little bit more real information going into this year as far as how we can plan that process for producing badges. But it went really well for us. We saw a significant number of people who were actually able to get their badges right at the airport when they landed, so that was really helpful.”