Supporting tech clients on the ground
Two Razorfish clients, Bread Financial and Samsung, have exhibits on this year’s show floor.
Bread Financial has 12 CES attendees focused on setting up its booth, and Razorfish’s role is to serve as a guide to the show. Razorfish has been working with Bread, formerly Alliance Data Systems, since 2021.
“[Razorfish is] really great at bringing things forward for us, [highlighting] what would be meaningful for us based upon the relationship,” said Jenny Hogan, senior director and head of DTC and channel marketing at Bread Financial.
For example, Razorfish set up a pre-show meeting with CNET’s Brian Cooley to give Hogan and other clients the lay of the land. Razorfish then put together a floor tour with Pinterest, where Bread already spends ad dollars.
Razorfish’s other client, Samsung, has a massive activation at CES that lays out its vision of how agentic AI is simplifying its vision for a secure, connected home. Razorfish didn’t work on the exhibit for Samsung this year, but Mariano’s team spent time walking through the expansive display—as well as competitors like LG—to get a sense of how attendees were responding.
“We’re on the eve of another marketing transformation,” Mariano said. “[Using] AI to get to personalization, to analyze the massive amounts of data sets that we have—you have to have the right system in place.”
Curating the show floor
On a floor tour with Pinterest on Wednesday, Razorfish’s clients across the entertainment, healthcare, and media industries walked through the connected home and health tech exhibitions at The Venetian Expo.
A client in the entertainment space said that while most of her time at CES is spent meeting new potential partners on the Las Vegas Strip, spending two hours walking the floor allows her to “keep your finger on the pulse just to know what can come next in the art of what’s possible.”
“There’s a lot of noise, and I think trying to find the signal can be difficult,” added another Razorfish client in the media industry. “That’s where the floor tours are really good, because someone is doing a little curation for you, they’re giving you some context, and that’s really helpful.”
A big focus of the tour was connected AI ecosystems powered by Matter, an open standard for smart home technology that stitches ecosystems together. Google, Amazon, Samsung, and AI chipmakers are adopting the protocol to make it seamless for consumers to connect their smart device ecosystems, regardless of who owns the hardware or software.
However, this promise of a connected ecosystem raises questions about the power dynamics over which companies will own the space, said a media marketing exec on the tour.
“How do we get people all on the same standards?” he said. “The way that companies are trying to combat that, either by producing the products themselves, all the way from the chip to whatever the product is on the end, or trying to develop their own standard to push people into that, or having more of an open system where any tech can work with it—that’s pretty fascinating.”
