CES has made it to the big time! Or the Golden Globes, at least. Consumer electronics have become increasingly easier to sell since the first CES was held in 1967 and there’s been a lot of discussion about how relevant the event still is to the tech industry and the world at large, even for top hardware makers.
As TechCrunch’s John Biggs wrote just before last week’s event “It’s as if the big guys are now just going through the motions. And they are.”
But it appears that companies may have inadvertently stumbled upon the secret of keeping the yearly event interesting: celebrity meltdowns. It’s been a week since Michael Bay fled the stage after a teleprompter malfunction during Samsung’s presentation — an eternity in Internet time, even for viral content — but people are still talking about the incident.
And videos of Bay’s mishap made the social media rounds again after Tina Fey mocked it during the Golden Globes tonight.
Fey’s parody was only a few seconds long and she didn’t actually run off the stage or even mention CES, but viewers immediately got the joke.
Michael Bay deserves some sympathy, just because you are a world-famous director doesn’t mean you’re good at public speaking. But at least Bay has Optimus Prime (and tons of cash) to console him.
While most of the biggest WTF moments in CES history (like 2013’s Qualcomm freakshow) probably had PR people screaming afterward, they did keep the event from becoming predictable and boring — which is important for all the smaller hardware companies which debut really amazing, creative and innovative products in Vegas every year.
