CES 2022 Day 2 Recap
Abbott Labs Keynote Recap, Notable Announcements, and Cool Discoveries from Thursday, Jan. 6
Welcome back to our daily recap of CES 2022! With the show now in full swing, we continue to bring you the latest and the coolest from the biggest consumer tech show on earth. We have a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in!
IPG Content Sessions Recap
Today’s CES content sessions kicked off with two important conversations on fostering diversity and inclusion in media and technology, hosted by our sibling agencies R/GA and MAGNA Global, respectively.
In the afternoon, the Lab team followed up the virtual tour yesterday with three more content disruption reports as well as two partnership conversations. First up, Josh Mallalieu, our Group Director, walked us through the future of mobility trends as seen through the lens of this CES. CES has increasingly become a place where auto brands come to show off their latest models, and Josh extrapolated some great insights behind the buzz around electric vehicles and various connected dashboards and in-vehicle screens to truly understand what it will take for us to get to the “Mobility as a Service” future.
Next up, our VP Partner of Strategy & Innovation, Chelsea Freitas, took us through some of the key trends reshaping how we interact with brands at home. Dissecting some key emerging trends in the booming at-home economy, Chelsea acutely pointed out how connected devices have turned our homes into a multi-functional space, and what brands can do to secure customer loyalty by offering a safer and more sustainable at-home brand experience.
After learning about what is happening in the home, we turned our attention to the workplace. Adam Simon, the US head of innovation for UM, took the Zoom stage to lay out some of the foundational trends that are changing the way we work, and how that will change the offices of the future. Noting that knowledge work will continue to become more hybrid and asynchronous, he implored companies to rethink their approach towards work policies and plans for the office, which will likely become a hub for resources that can out-perform what’s available remotely.
Ryan Miller, our partnerships manager, closed out today’s content sessions by linking up with two great partners, newsletter startup Morning Brew, and livestream service StreamElements. Both companies present great media opportunities for brands looking to reach their target audiences directly and intimately. After all, email is the new homepage, and live video is becoming a hot format in shoppable content.
As usual, recordings of all our content sessions will be available for IPG employees and our clients by inquiry. Please reach out to Ben Hone (ben@ipglab.com) to request a link if you missed any of these presentations and wish to catch up.
Abbott Labs Keynote Recap
By Katy Geisreiter
Kicking off day 2 of CES 2022, Chairman and CEO of Abbott Labs, the company behind popular at-home Covid test kit BinaxNOW, Robert B. Ford took the stage to deliver a much-hyped keynote on Thursday morning. As we noted in yesterday’s recap, this was the first time a healthcare company had delivered a keynote at CES, and the broad themes Ford offered up onstage — primarily, how the data collected by wearable technology and remote monitoring empower people to better understand their health and forge more democratic relationships with their healthcare providers — did not stray far from the optimistic vision of the future of health consistently on display at the event.
Ford began the keynote by touting his company’s long history, introducing Abbott to an audience accustomed to hearing keynotes from the usual tech and mobility companies. He highlighted Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre, the company’s continuous glucose monitoring system (CGM); the latest iteration, FreeStyle Libre 3 (a 2022 CES Innovation Award winner) delivers real-time glucose readings to the wearer’s phone via the world’s smallest, thinnest glucose sensor, that, according to Ford, costs “no more than a latte a day.” Actress and comedian Sherri Shepherd made an appearance to share how FreeStyle Libre 2 has not only helped her painlessly manage her diabetes, but helped her feel accountable for her health.
The keynote was punctuated by these personal stories showing how technology enables continuous, real-time health monitoring, which in turn leads to better healthcare outcomes. One such testimony was Tyrone Morris, a heart failure patient who was given six months to live but beat the odds with the help of three separate Abbott devices. Dr. Fiona Gupta of Mount Sinai Health System in New York also shared how she has used Abbott’s NeuroSphere Virtual Clinic, which allows her to remotely treat her patients with movement disorders and chronic pain with deep brain stimulation.
The pandemic was, of course, another key topic of the keynote. The company highlighted its partnership with United Airlines and digital health company eMed, which allows United customers to take Abbott’s BinaxNOW Covid tests (currently in short supply nationally and about to get more expensive) while traveling. Dr. Mary Rodgers, an Abbott virus hunter, also shared how the Abbott Pandemic Defense Coalition is working to identify new viruses and help stop them before they can spread.
The event culminated in the announcement that Abbott is developing a new category of bio-wearables it calls Lingo, which will aim to help people track key signals in the body (including glucose, ketones, lactate, and eventually alcohol) to help them better understand and manage their general health. Lingo is grounded in the sensing technology originally built for glucose monitoring, and further builds upon the Libre Sense Glucose Sport, a bio-wearable for elite athletes to optimize how they fuel their bodies for rigorous training, which launched in 2020.
The evolution of bio-wearables into this kind of continuous health monitoring device for the layperson isn’t surprising; biohackers have been wearing CGMs meant for people with diabetes in the “pursuit of human enhancement” for years. That said, wearable adoption is steadily increasing (user penetration is expected to reach 20.73% in 2022 and 23.27% by 2025, according to Statista), and each year, the medical devices on display at CES get smaller and less intrusive, making the tracking of any number of health conditions more seamless and painless. These trends suggest that the growing interest in hyper-specific, continuous health tracking beyond the San Francisco tech set is here to stay, which puts Abbott in a strong position… whenever Lingo actually becomes available.
Notable CES Announcements
As most big announcements have already been revealed on Tuesday and Wednesday, today we are left with a pair of interesting media innovation news that will hopefully spur new brand opportunities.
TikTok taps Atmosphere to bring TikTok videos to OOH screens in commercial venues [TechCrunch]
TikTok videos are coming to a fast food restaurant or gym near you. The short-form video app is partnering with Atmosphere, a streaming TV platform for businesses, to deliver its videos to commercial venues such as Taco Bell and Westin hotels.
TechCrunch says that Atmosphere essentially repurposes the videos it gathers, whether it’s from YouTube or TikTok. It then removes the audio, adds its own music (or potentially leaves it audio-less, since some venues keep their TVs on mute), slaps on a caption, and subsequently adds it to the stream of videos that make up a specific channel. While this does limit the type of TikTok content they can choose from, there will still be plenty of TikTok videos that don’t rely on a music cue or background track to be interesting.
TikTok has recently grown to more than 1 billion users, but its audience still skews pretty young, and having its video play in business could attract more, older viewers. For businesses using Atmosphere’s services, this presents an interesting way for them to incorporate popular UGC into their on-premise experience without compromising on brand safety.
Spotify is turning podcast ads into in-app banner ads [Campaign Live]
Spotify is making podcast ads more interactive and responsive by adding call-to-action (CTA) cards that will show up when an ad is played, the company announced at CES on Thursday. These CTA cards will begin showing up on its original and exclusive shows today when the corresponding ad or offer is mentioned, making it easier for listeners to check out the brand, product, or service they heard about while listening.
During testing, Spotify says that tests have shown “twice as many site visits with these new clickable ads compared to non-clickable podcast ads.” Hopefully, this new feature will help get away with the promo codes that many podcast hosts had to read out for attribution tracking purposes.
Cool CES Discoveries
GM-backed Pure Watercraft launches first electric pontoon boat at CES [Electrek]
If we can have electric scooters and bikes and cars, naturally we would have electric boats as well. International shipping makes up for a significant portion of the global carbon emissions, and it has been steadily increasing. Even though this pontoon boat is nowhere near being able to ferry goods, it is nevertheless a cool step towards eventually decarbonizing the shipping industry.
Amazon’s Alexa is going to space with NASA’s Orion this spring [BitJournals]
Alexa is following Amazon overlord and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos into space as part of an experimental payload on a NASA Orion mission this spring. Cisco’s Webex is also part of the project, spearheaded by Lockheed Martin. While this is a great marketing stunt, I can’t help but wonder what else can Amazon send into space for a fun marketing campaign.
What to Expect for Day 3
Tomorrow is the last day of CES 2022, and things are understandably starting to wind down. The Lab team will spend the morning recording a special edition of our Floor 9 podcast to offer our hot takes on the trends and standouts from this CES, so keep an eye out for that over the weekend! In the afternoon, Ryan will return with two more partner sessions, one with NFT platform Palm, and another with the team behind the privacy-minded Brave Browser. If you like to ponder about crypto, NFTs, and data privacy, you won’t want to miss these two sessions.
All of our content sessions are invite-only. Be sure to get in touch with our Director of Client Services, Ben Hone (ben@ipglab.com), if you’re interested.
As always, we will be publishing our comprehensive CES trend recap soon as the show closes. So be sure to sign up for our newsletter at www.ipglab.com or reach out to Richard Yao (richard@ipglab.com).
