Content stays in focus at CES 2023 as it adapts to changing technology

By Marty Swant

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is always a place for the world’s tech companies to pitch their vision for the future. However, marketers say the old adage of content as king is now playing out for the metaverse even while the adoption of virtual and augmented reality hardware still lags.

During the conference and trade show, some attendees noted that the innovations not on the showroom floor were in some cases more interesting than the physical products. For example, Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media, pointed to the rapid popularity of ChatGPT and Midjourney — hot topics throughout the Las Vegas bonanza — and both the excitement and challenges that come with adding artificial intelligence to creative tools.

“There’s a sludge effect of a lot of reasonably well-written content and decently rendered imagery that will flood the online world, sometimes maliciously,” said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media. “AI without people creatively working with it. And that could lead to companies undervaluing the thinking that powers great creative execution. And foment more mediocrity.”

Over the past few months, tech giants have been quickly rolling out new AI-powered tools for generating text, videos and images. Last year, generative AI made it onto the research firm Gartner’s annual marketing hype cycle report, which predicted it could reach mainstream adoption in a few years. However, the open-source nature of it, varied capabilities and low barrier to entry have allowed it to already go beyond early adopter curiosity, said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank.

“ChatGPT has broken the image of what AI was capable of doing,” Frank said. “Maybe 2023 is the year when AI really breaks out of the mode where it’s easy to recognize and starts to become a little bit spookier when it interacts with it.”

Beyond hardware specs, content was part of many tech companies’ pitches for the future of VR and AR. To show off its mixed reality headset and related software, Canon partnered with director M. Night Shyamalan, who is using the tech to bring viewers inside his films. Ahead of releasing its second-generation Playstation VR headset next month, Sony partnered with British soccer franchise Manchester City to create a new way for fans to interact in the metaverse as avatars. Meanwhile, Holoride showed off its in-car VR experience by letting people sit in the back of a 1967 Cadillac DeVille through its partnership with HTC.

Some attendees noticed less long-term hype around ambitious-but-not-yet-real tech and instead more focus on innovations related to shorter-term solutions. Brian Yamada, chief innovation officer at VMLY&R, said announcements around content creation tools felt more applicable this year along with innovations for tech such as augmented reality shopping. However, he said the actual use cases for AR still need to be clarified.

Despite the usual buzzy announcements, CES overall was less popular on social media than at any time in the past five years, according to data from BrandWatch. The analytics company found that CES was only mentioned on social media 290,000 …read more

Source:: Digiday