CES Exhibitor of the Week: Sharp Electronics

Name: Judah Ziegler

Title: Associate VP—Retail & Consumer Marketing Group

Size of 2009 CES Exhibit: 13,600 square feet

Size of Booth Staff: 40-50 brand ambassadors, 200+ Sharp employees

How have you evolved your experience at CES?

That’s a really interesting question. We, for a number of years, did the whole razzle-dazzle, three-ring circus. And a couple of years ago we started getting away from that. For one, it’s really expensive. Two, it didn’t really add anything to our channel partner experience. Ironically, we’ve gotten more kudos from people visiting our booth than before. We strive to be very clean, to make it easy to see the product. All the product is out there, but it doesn’t look like a flea market.
The experience is very clean, very open booths. You’re not shoulder to shoulder. Not that we aren’t busy—we are busy—but we’ve designed the booth so that flow is really good, line of sight is really good, and you don’t get the feeling that it’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

The result has been really positive from the standpoint of the attendees.
It becomes this oasis from the insanity that’s going on all over the floor, especially in the Central Hall. To the extent that you can do real business at CES, it’s all about doing business, and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re able to engage with our folks, actually engage with them without 17 dancers on the stage three feet behind them. That stuff is fine, too, but this is better for us. We think it’s better for the attendees as well.

Why are you excited about this year’s show?

We’re always excited about CES. It’s an opportunity to get our product out in front in the trade. We’ve got a lot of new product that’s garnering some positive press. We’ve got a bunch of stuff to talk about, as we always do at CES.
What are the some things that are new about the booth experience?
You’re not going to see some dramatic new build from Sharp. We are going to be enhancing the presence of assets that are related to our major league baseball sponsorship. We’re the official HDTV of major league baseball. We had one baseball player, David Ortiz, on site this year. We’re going to expand on the success of that. Attendees really enjoyed that experience.

The other thing we’re doing, not necessarily in our booth, we are working closely with our partners at NBC. They took some additional space at their booth, we took some additional space at our booth, and connected everything together. The little part of additional space we took is connected to their booth. Our products are going to be very much integrated into their booth, which we are very excited about.
What’s exciting is that we’re doing more and more around our sponsorship activation and then letting our channel partners know what our assets are throughout the year. We’re going to use CES as a platform to do that as well.

What are some of the biggest challenges of exhibiting at CES?

Cost. In this environment, it’s a huge expense. The challenge is making sure that we can conduct as much business as possible. None of us want CES to become Comdex, where you couldn’t engage the press, where you couldn’t get anyone’s attention because it is a zoo. The challenge is making sure we have the meetings with the partners that we need. The biggest challenge is trying to control that cost, because it is very, very significant.

In terms of Sharp’s presence, what are you most excited about this year?

You know, that’s a good question and I never answer that question until I get there. I always think one part is going to be, and I always get there and it’s totally a different part. Like I said, we’re not fundamentally changing our booth this year, so our main properties will be the same. We will be changing some interior properties. I can’t answer it yet.