CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show, completely overtakes Las Vegas, Nevada, for a week every year in January. It’s meant to show the world what new and inspiring gadgets and technologies will be enhancing our lives in the near future. In reality, it’s really just a place for buyers and sellers to meet, and companies to show off connected fridges, robots that drive themselves into walls, and opportunities for Shaq to play video games.
As I walked through the various show floors, displays, and casinos associated with CES this year, the thing that really stood out to me wasn’t any new piece of technology (something we at Quartz all agreed on), but rather, how terrible the advertising selling all these products really was. It’s like these companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure booths at CES, and then forgot to pay anyone to actually market whatever they were selling.
Below is snapshot of some of the more bizarre pieces of marketing copy I managed to capture this past week at CES:
Is McAfee selling antivirus software or a political platform?
I’m unclear why us humans need to have weird superimposed half-faces, or who exactly we’re fighting against? The dumb robots at CES?
It’s a play on the way you pronounce Huawei… get it? Shame “wow way” isn’t a thing anyone ever says.
CES is full of Democrats? CES is sad? CES is an Eiffel 65 song? Why’s it my fault?
Experience the power of systems management. Also, experience it later, because the entire convention floor had a power-outage.
There is nothing that Silicon Valley won’t try to disrupt, including physics.
Denso: Don’t skip leg day.
It would be Facebook. And I would move somewhere else.
Everything? Even lack-of-self-awareness-proof?
We can’t think of a good joke about the thing our product is for so we’ll make a joke about the other thing we do in bed.
I don’t know what bothers me more: this inane slogan, or pointless code it’s slapped on top of.
Make a fictional character feel emotions with our gadget that definitely isn’t as cool as x-ray glasses or laser-shooting watches.
I love to be delivered learning that drives my return on investment.
The company name is a bad pun, its product is jargon, but at least my VIP experiences will be recorded on a distributed ledger!
Wouldn’t that require… creativity?
These bots are like Doctor Who’s ship I guess?
Solid use of Microsoft Word 97’s WordArt function to describe a business bringing about the singularity.
This is like someone ran Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? through Google Translate one too many times.
Unlimited power!
Eyy, I got your tech right over here!
This company sells iPhone cases.
The future. Of sitting in traffic at CES.
