CES is the last of the tech mega trade shows still standing in the US. Yet this show, like many others, has suffered in recent years in terms of attendance, excitement and media coverage, as companies have pulled back marketing budgets in response to a bad economy.
I was not sure if I was just imagining it, but it seemed to me that this year’s CES really bounced back. The coverage has been impressive almost more for what it (and the show) did not include (as usual, Apple sat this one out, and since it is an electronics show, social media and cloud computing were not really represented).
Topics that were front center related to interplay of pivotal trends, technologies and national issues, like 4G, wireless, tablet computing, and government policy about broadband and wireless spectrum (FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski addressed CES about the last item, and that got lots of coverage).
Well, thanks to Factiva I can go beyond specualtion to get a pretty scientific view of media coverage and track not just number of articles, but topics, major trends, people, and media voices reflected in the articles.
So I decided to do a quick search to test my hypothesis. I searched major publications (filtering out wires and press releases) over 3-month periods spanning November-January for 2009, 2010 and 2011. You can see the numbers from Factiva below
- 2011: total articles: 1,784
- 2010: total articles: 1,435
- 2009: total articles: 877
According to Factiva, there were about 25% more articles this year (compared with 2010), and over double the number of articles that appeared in 2009 (the biggest bounce seems to be from 2009-2010). Steve Jobs eclipsed Steve Ballmer as the executive most often mentioned in the articles for the first time this year, despite the fact that Apple was not even at the show.
Social Mention gave me a way to track sentiment over the past month regarding the social media buzz about CES (unfortunately there is no way to compare with previous years). It showed an 8:1 ratio of mentions that were generally positive vs. negaitve.
I did not do a real thorough audit of broadcast, but seeing tons of news coverage from the show floor is what really drew my attention and made me think that the coverage was in general more extensive and also more exuberant this year than in other recent years.
