CES Content - Adapting Offline Content for Online Use

Content is King. There’s no two ways about it. It is clear that for a variety of reasons, content marketing has been a mainstay in every marketer’s arsenal, so there is nothing to be gained by exploring more of the same rhetoric. This piece aims to go deeper and explore more important questions, like how and why this has come to be the case, what insights can be gained from this knowledge, and most importantly, how you should move forward with this new perspective.

When you think about content marketing, some basic examples come to mind, blogs (much like this one – and we will get into that), User Generated Content (UGC), tutorials, most PR, unboxings, reviews, guided tours, and so very many more that simply listing them all would take pages. Looking at this list, you can see that not all of them need to be published, or even engaged with online – although this seems to be the route most businesses are taking when initially adopting a new digital marketing strategy (or even starting digital marketing in the first place).

Let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with adapting historically offline content for online use, especially when starting out, there are many benefits that come with doing so. It should go without saying that this is particularly relevant for businesses trying to adapt out of necessity like we are seeing become the case with COVID-19. Offline content is a source of material that already exists and thus is likely to be a great jumping off point for businesses struggling to keep up with the ever-shrinking attention span of digital natives and, more generally, consumers worldwide.

Take for example a tech-expo like CES (Consumer Electronics Show), these massive events usually have over 4,000 exhibitors and almost 200,000 attendees constantly creating content over a span of three days, reaching businesses, consumers, customers (important distinction), and stakeholders all over the globe. CES doesn’t have to produce much (if any) actual digital content because their marketing is done for them during the event itself, so all they need to make sure of is the physical side of things, ensuring there are pull-up banners throughout the revenue, spraying their branding on everything from microphones to entry passes. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t or don’t invest some resources into online content marketing, but this strategy works (or rather it used to) for them because they have reduced the areas of investment (and therefore time and resource allocation) so that they can focus on nailing just one thing perfectly and letting the entire attendance do the rest of the work for them.

Great! CES is good at offline content marketing, so what? So, look at them now, with the onset of COVID, they – as well as many, many businesses – are struggling as a result of their reliance on external means for online interaction. COVID has brought about a digital revolution across all industries. Yes, invest in digital marketing before you are forced to, get to the point! I hear you and I’m getting to it. CES had a decision to make. Either share their content with creators, reviewers, and the like and rely on them to spread it (which tech-companies could do on their own, making CES redundant), or cancel the event all together. Luckily, their team had plenty of time to prepare as COVID restrictions took effect in March, giving them nine months to come up with an innovative solution.

So how did CES respond? They held a virtual event and made it publicly available for the world to see. Yes, this came with the sacrifice of exclusivity and vastly reduced attendance, but – and herein lays the magic – they were still able to push through with the event. At a time when live events were practically unthinkable (outside certain well-contained countries/cities), CES was able to have an event, charge admission, and actually build hype for a digital experience!

This feat, while clearly a huge blow for the organizers (only reaching roughly 40% attendance of the last year, in-spite of a 50% reduction in ticket cost), was in my opinion a huge success. I don’t mean to say that taking a huge loss is in-itself a good thing, but instead that they were able to minimize the damage to both the brand and their showcasers with innovative technology. Looking at the video above (I hope you are actually engaging with all the content I’m putting up here or I fear this might end up a boring piece indeed), you can see depictions of a virtual space, this was their big idea. They attempted to recreate the entire experience of attending CES in-person, online.

Now, there are a few things to consider with this specific example. While the team, I’m sure did their absolute best, did manage to salvage the event to whatever degree possible, nothing is perfect, so let’s take a look at what they might have been able to do to improve things.

When attending an event like CES, the atmosphere plays a huge role in appreciating the sheer scale and magnitude of what you are experiencing. Even the overcrowded, jam-packed, shoulder-to-shoulder congestion around particular booths, while considered a negative whilst appraising the overall (offline) experience of CES, adds to the ambiance and allows attendees to really appreciate appreciating new tech among peers and like-minded or similarly enthused groups. CES decided to feature clear and empty hallways in an attempt to enhance the experience, but only resulted in a dead atmosphere, like visiting an empty museum – which is great for appreciating art – but quells the excitement attendees come for (whether they know it or not).

Instead of focusing on providing an augmented version of the same experience, the CES team should have (in my opinion) embraced the new medium they were on and played to its strengths. We see the same thing play out with late night talk shows. Used to having an audience to play jokes off of, they were (for the most part) unprepared to move to YouTube content creation and thus came across as slightly awkward in their clips. The digital landscape we all inhabit is great at what it does, delivering essential content quickly and with minimal impedance. It is great for an audience with bite-sized attention and time to spare, so content on the platform needs to be presented in easily digestible, readily available, well organized (and yet, seemingly conversely, unstructured) spaces.

I imagine a tile layout, much like YouTube, where content is accompanied by a thumbnail (or other visual representation) and a title. The interface could then be augmented to allow for 3D models to be examined alongside the accompanying video, text or aural explanation, review, critique or showcase. Is this a perfect solution, of course not, but it is catered to the audience’s needs. No one can expect would-be attendees to block out three days to surf the CES website or virtual grounds as they might do when attending in-person. It is more realistic to expect a few hours to be dedicated for an attendee, reviewer, business analyst or otherwise, to go over the offerings of the exhibit.

This is just one (rather drawn out) example of content marketing in a bubble, so by no means is it directly applicable to every business everywhere, but it serves the point I’m trying to make. When considering content marketing strategies, it is vital to appreciate the medium you wish to share this promotion on. There isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy because different industries and businesses will face different challenges in their digital strategies. A company can still get by with minimal change to their content strategy, but in the end, they may just be missing out on great opportunities around the corner.

Bringing this back to blogs (told you I would), this blog post is on my own personal website, giving me full creative licence to post how and whatever I please. I am incredibly interested in the tech space and am trying to get that across in the content I share. I am a visual learner, hence the videos. I like to analyse the constructs that make up the world we live in and ask why ad infinitum because I think it helps me contextualize what works, what doesn’t and what that means for future endeavors. If you are a recruiter, I hope this content demonstrates my interest and knowledge of the tech-space and paints me in an employable light with my thirst for knowledge and endless curiosity.

If you aren’t looking for a marketer, chances are you’re interested in marketing and fell down the LinkedIn rabbit hole of connections of connections of connections and just stumbled across my website and you now find yourself wondering what you’ve been doing for the past half hour. To you, I answer, getting another perspective on an industry norm, and (hopefully) learning about how every success or failure can be a chance to ask “Why?”