Day 2 Recap at #CES2014 from Ogilvy & Mather

1. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 2

2. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 2
1
Yes, but Would You Want to
Wear It
With all the talk of wearable tech, you could be forgiven for thinking that fashion week had
merged with CES. Until you looked at some of it, at least. Form follows function sounds grand
when one is pointing at the elevation of the new building you’re developing. It’s less appealing
in reference to something that’s going to reside on your face. A few clever folks have tumbled
to that and are figuring out what people will wear with pride and only then working out how
to cram all the tech in there.

3. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 2
2
Re-education
Bands
Fashion quibbles aside, wearable tech is booming. Fitness wearables alone are on track to
crest $1 billion in market size in 2014. The quantified self is no longer an abstraction, but
we’ve got to figure out how to irrigate our lives with this data stream. Better, more contextual
recommendations is the stock answer, the one on every tech thinker’s talking points, but the
cool stuff happens when the friction between the data streams is washed away. Wearable
tech prompts modified behavior. Data, as Mark McClusky of Wired maintains, is one of
the few things that will reliably push us to change. We’re voluntarily submitting ourselves
to monitoring and behavior modification. And isn’t changing behaviors exactly what
advertising is all about? We’ve got a place in this world, but we had better tread lightly.
This is intimate territory.

4. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 2
3
Drivable
Tech
Integrated data streams is exactly what Ford is working on. They’re looking at wearable
tech as a means to monitor what Gary Strumolo from Ford called, “driver workload.” With
enough biometric data, the car could decide whether or not to put through an incoming call,
for example, based on how much current and cumulative driving stress you’re under. Or, for
people with diabetes, the car could connect with continuous glucose sensors to prompt the
driver to attend to his blood sugar before he becomes unsafe behind the wheel. How about
not being behind the wheel at all? Audi’s piloted drive, introduced last year, has shrunk to
a chipset the size of an iPad. Google’s racked up tens of thousands of miles without a major
accident in it’s self-driving cars. The autonomous vehicle is being buzzed about even if it’s still
quite a way off, but the rest of the automotive tech is here right now. It’s made the automobile
the largest and most complex piece of mobile technology we have, and, as Rupert Stadler of
Audi said, it moves the car company from “refining the auto to redefining mobility.”

5. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 2
4
Internet
Almost Everywhere
Cisco told us that the internet is everywhere. Everywhere except at CES, that is, where a solid signal was
rare, even when you cough up a Benjamin for the premium shi*t. The grand promise of the internet of
things depends on uninterrupted connectivity. So, yikes? Still, as everyone who was not an ISP or telco
maintained, internet everywhere isn’t about connectivity. It’s about the systems that tie it all together to
create a seamlessly personalized and incredibly unsettling world. Skepticism aside, there is real value
in systems that eliminate the allergy to interoperability that so much of our connected tech suffers
from—so long as these systems converge data in a way that benefits the end-user. Which means, as
John Chambers puts it, “just in time data to just in time arrival to just in time to the right device to
allow the person or machine to make the right decision.” If that happens and we really do eliminate
the middlewearman, then Chamber’s bold prediction—that the internet will be five to ten times more
influential than it is today—just might come true. When (let’s be optimistic) that happens, we’ll reap
a global $19 trillion to the public and private sector in additional profit and savings from internet
everywhere’s increased efficiency.

6. 2014
International
CES
recap
Day 2
5
Making Sense of the
Chaos
Done right (which means, in Cisco’s argot, that IT is “simple, fast, seamless, and smart”), the
internet of things will ease our path in the world, allowing us to shop for clothes without
agony or find a movie on Netflix without a feature-length decision making process. Until then,
we’re stuck with today’s chaos. The user experience still lags behind the underlying capability
of the tech. As content proliferates, our systems for curating and discovering what’s worth our
time haven’t kept up. Brands can help. As Keith Weed of Unilever said, we erect filters to keep
out the barrage of messages headed our way every second. “Brands,” he continued, “depend
on breaking through that.” They break through to us not to interrupt our passage but rather
to simplify our path. At their best, they “engage us with content we value and help us make
our way through the welter of fragmentation we confront.”