Cover Feature
Bell of the ball
HERE’s pavilion, by Jack Morton
crowd with monolithic, cathedral-
like exhibits designed to immerse
attendees in their product and
service experience.”
Google made headlines by
tripling its presence from 2018 to
2019 and by having a rollercoaster
on the stand designed to show
visitors in a fun and immersive
way how they could use Google
Assistant throughout the day.
“Google wanted this to be
a really great experience for
people,” says Chupka. “One of
the fun things is that we get to sit
down with companies and really
help them try to figure out how
to do something with their brand
that helps resonate with what
they’re trying to achieve at the
show.”
Finally, it isn’t just big brands
that have a home at the show. CES
ensures that small companies and
start-ups have an opportunity
to exhibit and to potentially find
new partners or buyers. The
show’s start-up area featured over
1,200 companies hailing from
all around the world at the 2019
event.
“We had some really great
success stories of companies that
came into that area, received
funding and grew year-on-year
into larger companies.,” concludes
Chupka. “As an association that is
one of our most important rules –
helping small businesses come to
the show and grow.” EN
Here and now
HERE Technologies partnered with Jack
Morton to launch an immersive brand
experience at CES.
The experience, Step into the New Reality,
was designed to bring to life the importance
of location data and the impact it has on
our day-to-day lives. The technologies that
enable a safer, more efficient and connected
world require precise maps of our physical
world. HERE harvests and processes
enormous amounts of data to create these
maps through ‘location intelligence’. However,
most consumers are not aware of location
data. In order to illustrate the power of
location intelligence at CES, the brand enlisted
Jack Morton. The team merged the physical
world with the virtual one in a unique, branded
3D LED architectural experience where the
lines between data and reality blurred.
The HERE pavilion invited visitors through
an immersive media entrance to enter an
experience that overlayed real and virtual
worlds. Six innovative demo installations and
an interactive city model provided an intuitive,
simple and application-oriented dive into the
potential of location data intelligence.
“Our client sees CES as an opportunity
to connect to a global audience and demo
all services as one consistent experience,”
Julien Le Bas, executive creative director, Jack
Morton Germany, tells EN. “CES has become
the brand’s yearly external communication
platform. Of course, this major opportunity to
connect to the audience comes at one large
price: an epic fight for attention. The challenge
is to build brand awareness while cutting
through the noise. Our brief was to craft a
distinctive pavilion that would attract the
audience and engage with it. The idea was to
surprise both the client and the audience.”
Global aircraft producer Bell revealed
a full-scale mock-up of its newest
highly-automated hybrid lift vehicle,
the Nexus Air Taxi, at CES 2019. The
company was looking to reinforce
its status as a true technology
innovator and ensure that CES
attendees would be talking about it
in a big way.
What better way to show
attendees the future of urban
mobility than to bring a full-scale
Air Taxi? GES worked with Bell to
design an exhibit to introduce the
Nexus and showcase an exciting
AR experience that would give
attendees a glimpse of how Nexus
could change their everyday world.
Utilising augmented reality, Bell
overlaid digital content on the Nexus,
highlighting multiple scenarios and
applications to illustrate how the
transportation of people and goods
could become more efficient and
effective. Scenes of a family leaving
for the airport – not via the traditional
taxi or Uber but aboard the Nexus
– played alongside scenes of the
Nexus transitioning into a logistics
carrier and helping a company
become more productive.
The exhibit was a complete
showstopper. The grand finale of the
showcase was seeing the ducts on
the Nexus rotated to their vertical
position to forward flight mode. An
audible gasp could be heard from
the audience every time they moved
and neighbouring exhibits came to a
standstill in awe of the spectacle.
The exhibit attracted over 7,000
visitors and delivered outstanding
results across social and the media,
including 66k video views on
Facebook, 11,000 engagements on
LinkedIn and 85,000 impressions on
YouTube. Bell appeared in more than
2,000 CES media stories and was
cited by six top influencers including
WIRED and CNET, dwarfing that of its
competitors with 81 per cent share of
relevant coverage.
April — 25