How Razorfish Walks Advertisers Through the Chaos of CES

ADWEEK is shadowing Razorfish at CES this week. Follow along for more behind-the-scenes reporting from the event.

The Consumer Electronics Show showcases the latest technology across the globe at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Flying cars, smart glasses, haptic suits, bigger and better TV screens, and endless use cases for AI abound.

But for marketers, the splashy tech is only a part of the show.

Much of the advertising and marketing industry’s official CES programming is clustered two miles south in the C-Space at the Aria where brands, agencies, and platforms host back-to-back meetings with current and prospective clients.

When agencies do head to the convention center, it’s to support clients with exhibitions at the show or to show current and prospective clients what’s buzzy and trends they should be looking for.

The challenge is to whittle down CES’ sprawling display of emerging tech to the most essential things that advertisers need to know.

“There’s a lot of stuff here that doesn’t have anything to do with marketing or advertising,” explained Dani Mariano, president of agency Razorfish. “You have to look for the things that we think will have an impact versus what’s just [generally] interesting.”

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.” 

The tour also zeroed in on health tech. With protocols like Matter, for instance, a consumer’s smart fridge could connect to their wearable device to create customized diet and workout plan accessible on their smart TV. That biometric information can then seamlessly route back to their healthcare provider.

From a marketing perspective, the amount of data being collected through these devices has real implications. For instance, on a tour stop at Govee, a smart connected home company, the guide explained how its technology connects back to major retailers like Home Depot and Walmart, and could eventually provide data that informs their retail media networks.

Sparking questions for the future

For the media marketing exec, the tour raised questions about “not only the applications of this tech, but the implications of it from a cultural perspective,” he said.

“There is no denying the fact that large language models are having an impact,” the person said. Especially as many AI models begin to interact with each another, “that’s leading to some really interesting possibilities,” he added.

But it also leads to difficult questions about bias, which often aren’t addressed in the show floor set up. Those questions include the ethical sourcing of AI, fair treatment of creators whose work is training large language models, brand safety, and AI’s impact on mental health.

“This idea of diversity sometimes gets lost, but those are the things I would like to see tech struggling with a little more and being a little bit more transparent,” he said.