Okay, I know that CES was in JANUARY of 2006, (and it's already October) and no, it's not a treatise on my quest for immortality, but this just hit me again and I thought I'd share some thoughts.

Brad and I went to CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), as we usually do.  We walked something like 18 football fields of "new stuff" in the digital arena.  Without question, CES has come a long way from the first time I attended, when I had the interesting experience of meeting a porn star in the ladies room (because CES had an entire section of the show for porn).  Now (having shed the porn), it's enormous, it's hip, it killed Comdex, it's "the" show for non-enterprise computing, as well as the traditional consumer electronics gear like TV's, home theater systems and the like. 

After we got back, many people asked us "if it was great" and if there was a lot of exciting new products.  We said, candidly, no.  There were only two cool things at CES this year.  All of the rest of the stuff was "old hat" or derivative.  We saw thousands of beautiful flat screen televisions.  All of them hung on walls 10-20 feet high and often 20-40 feet long.  It was like walking in a weird kaleidescope (or old fashioned house of mirrors).  Weird, and none of it different or exciting, just flat.  Everything else that was shown was "expected".  We literally saw only one true technical breakthrough, and that was Toshiba's SED technology (I may talk about that later, let's just say the other screen vendors who saw the demo of this amazing new flat screen technology were trembling in their shoes!)

But the one "best thing" that mattered, the one that stuck, was from Kodak.  We sort of resigned ourselves to going into the Kodak booth - what did Kodak have to say about the new digital world?  Nothing very interesting we imagined.  And candidly the products they displayed were nice, but, again, nothing revolutionary.  But, and it was a big but, Kodak showed one of their commercials (they'd been running it for a bit before CES), a commercial that showed that, whether or not they could execute, somebody there, "got it". 

Consumers aren't buying electronics for features (except us "left turners" in Cooper's vocabulary), they're buying consumer electronics for what it GIVES them, what it DOES for them, how it makes them feel or enhances their life experience.  As one great market researcher used to remind me whenever we'd gear up for a focus group "these customers don't care about you or your product!"  It's a great insight. 

Kodak "got it".  They played the "Kodak Gallery" commercial.  If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to spend a few minutes and check it out.  It's not on Kodak's site anymore, but the Editor Adam Liebowitz has it posted (more on the creative team here).

Here's a snapshot:  Kids, in a gallery of photos, famous and not so famous, are encouraged to "listen" to the pictures.   Because the pictures are saying:

• Keep Me
• Protect Me
• Share Me
• And I will Live Forever

(I repeat here, if you haven't seen the clip, definitely go see it, it reminds us that truly creative people are a lot more compelling than text!)

Ever wonder why it's estimated that in the neighborhood of 1 trillion digital pictures have been snapped? Why photo printers are hot?  Why camera phones are hip and why online photo sharing and printing and "gift creating" sites and services are booming?  Because human beings want to live forever, and the photo is our ticket to immortality.

So, do you "get" what matters in your industry?