AI Your Commercials

Yesterday marked Day One at CES 2025, but it already feels much longer than that.  We flew out Sunday from Detroit – concurrent with the start of the Lions/Vikings showdown on “Sunday Night Football.”  So, it feels like we’ve already had ample time to soak up the CES vibe for this year.

After 16 straight years of showing up to this amazing altar of innovation, we’ve learned that each CES has its own unique feel.  And rather than thinking about them as annual snapshots, CES to us is like a motion picture with a clear narrative.  Like AI itself, you get to the point where you get pretty adroit at predicting what’s coming.  Last summer when we started our tour planning, we told our partners at the Consumer Technology Association we were ready for what Bridge players call a “jump shift.”

We knew this year’s CES would be dominated by AI, not so much at the expense of other technologies, but as the DNA that will power them for many years to come.  All that said, this year also marks less presence from several industries and platforms, including automotive, autonomous driving, EVs, and the metaverse.  They all still had presence this year, but were overshadowed by AI.

Now I know some of you are thinking the whole thing is just another tech buzzword designed to win us over with hype and glitz.  But the beauty of this year’s CES – kicked off with a memorable keynote from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang that will set the tone not just for this year’s show, but for where technology itself is headed in the future.

If there was one goal for CES 2025, it was to bring AI to life.  And the show – just one day in – is accomplishing just that.  Along with Paul and Chris Brunt, you will hear more from us about AI.  Chris’ newsletter –  “AI Edge” – which I hope you subscribe to – is just one year-old, but has nailed many of the key trends and impacts of this technology.  Thanks to this amazing show, Chris will have no shortage of strong content for the newsletter for several weeks.

It feels like we were headed to yet another CES event and ended up attending a revolution.  I am convinced that when we look back at these conferences years from now, we will think about 2025 as a groundbreaker.

Thanks to Inside Radio and my old friend and colleague, Paul Heine, you can read our reports this week that will bring more perspective to this conversation about what this technology means to radio.  Today’s post is here. 

Both of our tours took place yesterday, so I got to watch a whole lotta CES first-timers not just take in this amazing show, but also find themselves in a situation where they frankly had a lot to process.  That first CES is always a bit precarious – the crowds, the hype, the sights, the sounds.  It is truly sensory overload, especially if you’ve never experienced it before.

On Monday before the show officially opens, Paul and I joined Shawn DuBravac and his son Nick on a walk-through of West, North, and Central Halls.  And Shawn joked that if seeing/hearing “AI” were a drinking game, we’d all be hammered within 90 seconds of walking into the Las Vegas Convention Center.  The photo montage at the top of this post typifies the rampant use and marketing of everywhere you look at CES.

Still, there ae surprises  – those moments of serendipity you experience at this show, often when you’re least expecting it.  Two of those experiences happened to us before our two tours began.  Thanks to the agile touring team at CTA, we were able to incorporate them into our itineraries.  Interestingly, both are about how AI will disrupt, change, and perhaps even redefine the advertising experience.

The first was off in a corner of the massive LG exhibit – taking up more space than any other display at CES.  We bumped into an exhibit called “LG DOOH Ads.”  The acronym stands for “Digital Out of Home” and it’s a prime example how LG uses AI to predict advertising impressions to demographics as well as indicators of how physical advertising captures the attention of consumers.  Small cameras placed on the top of displays capture facial features – and then the AI takes over, converting this information into data that shows who’s eyes are on the ads – a demographic profile so the actual ad shown fits the person seeing it.  Heat maps and other charts map it out.

The LG solution also allows advertisers to select specific placement requirements for client marketing, including what other products cannot be in the same proximity.  LG’s DOOH platform can also use programmatic tools powered by AI.

Suffice it to say, among the big screen TV’s, the digital test kitchens, and the car cockpits, LG’s new AI-enabled advertising venture had our tours taking lots of photos and asking even more questions.

And then we discovered another advertising innovation, again powered by AI, in the cavernous SK exhibit.  You’ve likely not heard of this South Korean company that is a CES mainstay.  Despite their steady presence at the show, even CTA staffers aren’t exactly sure whether SK is more similar to companies like LG and Samsung or Verizon and AT&T.  Nonetheless, their displays are always colorful and compelling.

Yesterday morning before the first tour, we were exploring SK’s wares and ran into “Commercial AI,” a suite of ad production services that stopped us in our tracks.  Our two SK guides, Yong and Kevin, walked us through how the AI-powered technology walks Main Street advertisers through a shot series of questions about their specific preferences for an ad – mood, music, the type of VO announcer (gender, tone).  It then creates different creative scenarios before offering the client a storyboard for the spot.  The final step is to actually produce a video spot.

Total time for this process?  About 5 minutes.

Of course, AI is being used by many radio stations right now to perform tasks such as filling out CNA forms, cranking out thank-you emails, and even writing commercial copy.  But this new SK AI concept was an illustration of how the technology can mash up prediction and speed to accomplish tasks that typically require days and even weeks, often costing thousands of dollars in the process.

CES 2025 is showing its 150,000+ attendees how AI isn’t just something on the drawing board, but a tangible engine that is changing everything about how we do what we do.  Or better put, how we’ll do it in the not-so-distant future.

I’ll have more observations for you from CES 2025.  And be sure to read the coverage this week in Inside Radio.  

We will also be hosting a free webinar on Tuesday, January 21 at 2pm ET, so “save the date (and time).”

We’re witnessing AI become aspirational, attractive, and very real right before our very eyes in Las Vegas this week.

More. Soon.

You can subscribe to Chris Brunt’s “AI Edge” newsletter here.