CES 2007 Wrap Up: The Booth Tour

Creative

Creative puts on a show for us almost every year. The booth is one of the largest in the four south halls, but it's busiest at its front edge.

In the left-hand picture, you can see the Creative stage. Once every half hour or so, a couple PR guys who are vastly underpaid (given the level of embarrassment they had to endure) stand up there and do a comedy routine. The first time you watch it, it's only mildly annoying - by the tenth time you've walked past the booth, however... we'll just say we hope the guys get hazard pay. Oh, and if you look at the large version of this picture, you'll see a bluish X-Fi logo kind of floating in space - that was a projected image on a smoke screen. It was pretty slick, until someone would walk through it and disrupt the smoke (and therefore the image).

The second picture is from the other front corner. In the background are two displays set up - this is for the Fatal1ty Shoot-outs. Jonathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendell plays head to head against lucky contestants whose names are drawn at the booth. If you wondered how they get people to sit through the show on the stage, here's the carrot and stick.

Seagate

Seagate's booth had one of my favourite designs this year. The booth consisted a lot of vertical space, which was not only visually appealing but a brilliant use of floor space. After all, you're paying for all three dimensions of space, why not see how high the banners can go?

The neatest thing about the booth had to be its visual meanings. Seagate's Maxtor acquisition raised a lot of question as to how the two would integrate, and the answer has largely been "we're not." To illustrate this, Seagate divided its booth with blue and white carpets - the blue side contained Maxtor products only, and the white side contained only Seagate products. It was a clear "line in the sand" approach to illustrate the two very different focuses of the brands.

Having things look sharp is always nice, but it's even better when that extra flair actually means something. Props to the company's marketing wizards who thought of this... that is, unless they're also the ones who thought of the new slogan - "Your on." Didn't anyone teach these guys the "big demons" in grammar school?!