Event Presence

The 3 Biggest CES 2025 Takeaways for Marketers & Advertisers

07 Jan 2025

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is always a major moment at the start of each year, where brands showcase innovations that are bound to transform how we live. For example, CES is where we saw the debut of GPS-enabled automobile technology and the first 1080p television.

What is CES?

Here’s what many people think CES is: a bunch of tech companies taking over Las Vegas for about a week, showing off their biggest, shiniest gimmicks, while reporters flock to the desert to capture the latest clickbait. That’s an understandable takeaway, especially when you read the top posts on Google News.

But make no mistake, it’s a major press event for a reason. It’s amazing (and newsworthy) to experience new inventions like AI integrated televisions, devices that allow users to fully charge their phone in two seconds, and a robot vacuum that actually picks toys up off the floor instead of pushing them around. Aside from seeing flashy new gadgets first-hand, for a lot of marketers on the ground, CES is an opportunity to have creative, intelligent conversations with professionals on the cutting edge of technology. The annual event is a renowned industry platform for previewing upcoming consumer technology trends, enabling crucial head starts for teams seeking to understand – and leverage – evolving consumer behaviors that will inevitably feed into strategic marketing campaigns for the year ahead.

Our Biggest Marketing Takeaways from CES 2025

If you didn’t make it to CES, no worries. We touched base with our three resident experts on the ground to give you the biggest highlights from inside and outside of the venue. Introducing:

• Kolin Kleveno, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships
• Elizabeth Marsten, Vice President of Innovation and Growth
• Lauren Wolfen, Vice President of Product Management

Here’s what they had to say. 

Artificial intelligence is old news

Tired: AI. Wired: AGI.

We all remember when ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2023, followed by a surge of thought leadership articles throughout 2024. While we might get a brief respite in 2025, it will likely make way for discussions about artificial general intelligence (AGI). Although this technology is still in its early stages, it’s poised to be a major disruptor in the marketing world.

Consumer devices like TVs are already being envisioned with AGI capabilities, enabling them to understand a consumer’s interests and automatically create multiple personas for viewers. For example, a device could be trained to recognize that you’re a budget-friendly traveler and then provide tailored, helpful recommendations based on its inherent knowledge base. This marks a significant departure from models that rely on specific prompting and return probabilistic results based on preset training data.

The implication is clear: in the future, we won’t just market to people – we’ll also need to market to their machines. This general intelligence will augment everything consumers do, simplifying tasks like knowledge searches and product research. With less manual input required from users, marketers must ensure their content is optimized to appear where machines are searching – not just where users are looking.

 LG’s artificial general intelligence offering at CES 2025

While the AI landscape will continue to evolve, two truths will remain for the foreseeable future: people create, and AI executes. These are distinct concepts that shouldn’t be conflated. Innovations in AI are set to transform work as we know it, but marketers should respond by leaning into creativity.

Start by evaluating your current role: how much relies on your creativity versus your ability to perform specific tasks? Use your creativity to identify ways AI can help you execute those tasks more effectively, and focus on cultivating your creative instincts and those of your team. As AI simplifies task execution, creativity will become an increasingly significant competitive advantage.

The impact of innovative display technology

Tinuiti’s experts were ready for a variety of exciting innovations as soon as they entered the main hall of CES. They were met with holograms, projections, televisions, and virtual reality experiences. Elizabeth Marsten even had the chance to try a Godzilla video game transformed into a fully immersive VR experience.

Elizabeth Marsten using Godzilla immersive VR arcade booth

This set the stage for a major theme at CES: innovative display technologies. Electronics companies like Toshiba and LG showcased clearer, crisper, and even multi-dimensional displays. While these displays had an undeniable “cool” factor, their real significance lies in their potential to transform the media landscape.

Some of us remember the first time we saw a high-definition television—watching a football game and noticing the turf flying off players’ cleats. What’s now standard was once revolutionary, and HDTV was shown to make viewers feel more immersed in the content.

Now, imagine an even more immersive, three-dimensional experience in everyone’s living room. This isn’t just exciting for the entertainment industry; it also opens the door for brands to create more tangible and realistic interactions with their products and experiences.

Retail media continues to take over

Retail media has already taken the world by storm, and it made more than a few appearances at CES. The Tinuiti team observed an increase in events focused on commerce and retail media, with more executives exploring its potential, plus intriguing retail media partnerships across novel industries. For instance, Yahoo and Roku announced a new partnership to develop an advanced demand-side platform, while Delta and YouTube joined forces to provide ad supported in-flight entertainment.

Commerce Connect retail media panelists at CES 2025

Elizabeth Marsten, was particularly intrigued by Amazon’s Retail Ad Service. As the largest retail media network, Amazon’s potential to expand in this sphere is nearly limitless, giving the Retail Ad Service significant power to transform retail media engagement.

However, Marsten ultimately found the announcement somewhat underwhelming. “The retailers included in the press release were long-tail and category-niche, making the overall value proposition of one UI or campaign to manage multiple retailers for the same SKU set difficult.” According to Marsten, until Amazon resolves this, competitors like Criteo, Koddi, and Epsilon may not feel much pressure.

A tentpole event for the industry, marketers and agencies specifically rely on the technical partnerships and advancements often announced at shows like CES.

Some attendees, however, found this year’s innovations and messaging more confusing than illuminating. One notable comment overheard at the event was:

“This CES is a hot mess because every brand is sharing their own version of the future.” 

When it comes to early-stage innovations, it’s unsurprising that it’s not always clear what will have real-world impact, what’s mostly hype, and what will ultimately resonate with consumers. This initial lack of clarity, particularly evident with nascent products and developments, is a familiar phase in the intersection of marketing and technology.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from CES is this: while we glimpsed technologies that could transform the world, the most significant challenge for businesses may lie in pursuing a clear vision for the future—and understanding how these new technologies will function within it.

That’s why Tinuiti is committed to solving problems related to clarity. While we can’t predict the future, Tinuiti is a trusted partner for marketers and technologists alike, helping them navigate what’s next with confidence. Thanks to our advanced measurement capabilities and strong partnerships with major advertising platforms like Google and Netflix, we’re excited to continue bringing marketing clarity into 2025—in measurement, strategy, and the informed decision-making that drives both.

Curious about how we do it? Learn more about our Bliss Point by Tinuiti measurement suite, or reach out to our measurement experts to get a use case for your own business. 

Event Presence

Maximizing Lead Generation: Key Takeaways from Google’s Think Lead Gen 2024

By Tinuiti Team

23 Oct 2024

This post was authored by Bradley White, Steven George, and Anthony Welsh

Google hosted its 2024 Think Lead Gen Conference on October 9th in NYC and once again delivered cutting-edge insights into the evolving world of digital marketing. Anders Mortensen, Managing Director of Lead Gen Sales, opened the event and highlighted the day’s main theme – bidding to value vs. bidding to volume. Anders went as far as joking that he wanted to help advertisers get fewer leads.

At the core of his message was the notion that all leads are not created equal, but by mapping out the consumer journey, bidding towards value (specifically with post-lead actions), and leveraging Google’s AI-powered solutions, advertisers can build a more qualified lead pipeline. Which, in turn, can maximize profitability. 

What is Think Lead Gen?

Google’s Think Lead Gen is a premier event for marketers and businesses, focusing on the latest strategies and tools to drive effective lead generation. The conference is designed to help businesses attract high-quality prospects, nurture leads through personalized experiences, and turn them into long-term customers. Attendees learn how to optimize their marketing funnels and improve conversion rates. 

This year, Google Lead Gen took a deep dive into data-driven marketing, showcasing how companies can map out detailed customer journeys, use first-party data effectively, and leverage AI to increase profitability. This was done via fireside chats with industry leaders, presentations from Google’s solutions leads, and Q/A with members of the direct product/innovation teams. The event offered actionable insights into navigating the complexities of consumer behavior and integrating modern marketing tools to fuel sustainable growth.

Key Takeaways from the Google Lead Gen Conference 2024 

1. Mapping Your Customer Journey for Maximum Impact

One of the most valuable insights this year was the emphasis on mapping each touchpoint in your customer’s journey—from lead acquisition to sale and everything in between. Google and industry experts discussed aligning your marketing funnel with your business objectives to ensure you attract the right type of leads, not just any leads. Asking questions like: “Does our on-site behavior help differentiate users who will likely become high/low-quality leads?”, “Is there a step between our lead and conversion action that has enough regular volume to bid towards?” are imperative to pair channel efforts with behavioral data. Today, only 1 in 5 advertisers are bidding towards lower-funnel actions. 

Businesses were encouraged to assign values to each conversion action, both online and offline, and focus on lower-funnel conversion actions to optimize their bidding strategies instead of focusing lead form submissions. The takeaway: understand the true value of each stage in the journey to drive the most profitable outcomes.

2. Integrating First-Party Data for Deeper Insights

Google encouraged advertisers to take control of your customer journey with Google’s first-party data tools, specifically connecting online and offline interactions using: 

Enhanced conversions for web to maximize signal and minimize cookie loss on-site actions (e.g. a lead form submission or download) 

Enhanced conversions for leads to improve tracking for qualifying actions using user-provided data.

Implementing your first-party data unlocks the power of Google AI to optimize for profitability, achieve greater scale, optimize bids, and convert high-value prospects while nurturing customer relationships throughout the entire funnel and driving sustained growth. 

3. Unlocking the Power of AI

AI continues to be at the forefront of digital marketing, and Google showcased how AI-powered solutions can transform the way businesses generate leads. Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Broad Match keywords all use AI to target high-value prospects, optimize bids, and scale marketing efforts efficiently. AI can also streamline creative processes, with Google’s generative AI tools enabling the creation of compelling ad variations, asset mockups, and copy in seconds. 

4. Moving Beyond Volume to Focus on Value

Another key insight from the conference was the shift from focusing on the volume of leads to focusing on the value of those leads. By mapping the entire customer journey and assigning value to each stage, businesses can optimize their campaigns for profitability rather than simply increasing lead volume. Google’s presentation concluded how, with continued improvements in machine learning and AI optimization, it is important to provide Google’s bidding algorithm this information to not only find users who will initiate a lead action, but users who will take the next action. 

5. Crafting Hyper-Personalized Marketing Experiences

The conference reinforced the idea that in today’s competitive market, delivering personalized and relevant experiences is crucial. With consumers narrowing their choices to just one or two brands during the decision-making process, businesses need to craft unique value propositions at each touchpoint. Google industry insights showed 63% of US consumers agree that making the right purchase decisions require more effort than it used to. Maintaining relevance throughout a decision journey is essential for advertisers to distinguish themselves from the pack.

Advertisers can navigate the complexities of the modern consumer by identifying key touchpoints, understanding customer intent at each stage, and tailoring messaging accordingly. This involves leveraging full funnel tactics via Demand Gen + Performance Max for reach and consumer relevance while mixing with a nuanced approach in attribution to measure the success of the right actions taken at the right points in the funnel. 

Conclusion

Google’s Think Lead Gen Conference reinforced the importance of leveraging first-party data, AI, and personalized marketing strategies to drive profitable growth. By mapping out the customer journey, integrating first-party data, and using AI-driven tools to optimize campaigns, businesses can attract and convert high-value leads with greater efficiency.

This year’s event highlighted that success in lead generation is no longer about sheer volume; it’s about finding the right leads and nurturing them with tailored experiences that deliver long-term profitability, while also fueling the platforms with first-party data to help continue to build high-quality lead volume across all campaign types.

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