The ask

Re-inventoing the way consumers engage on the CES show floor and beyond.

Consumer Technology Association engaged Huge to develop a best-in-class tradeshow website for the Consumer Electronic Show (CES). At the onset, CTA’s primary concern was making their website mobile friendly and fixing key usability issues. After taking a deeper look, we realized CES was facing a lot of challenges as a business because the future of trade shows is unstable.

One of their biggest challenges was that companies were looking to CES less and less to launch new products. This was caused by a new generation of customers are using digital and social to grow their networks rather than tradeshows. 

In addition, they had literally reached maximum capacity and as a show could no longer scale. This challenge opened the opportunity for a larger opportunity for CES: To go beyond the show and made CES.tech the go-to source for emerging technologies year-round. The key was to maintain the balance of the primary logistical and marketing need the CES.tech site had to serve leading up to and during the show.

The work

While the pre-show or “in-season” experience highlights and markets the show, it also begins to pull to the forefront the thought leadership. The post-show or “off-season” experience will shift to primarily be dedicated to thought leadership.

In a short four-month timeframe we launched phase one of the “in-season” experience. To meet a tight Ilaunch date we developed a cross-functional interdisciplinary scrum team across Huge who owned the strategy, user experience, design and frontend development. CTA led technical integration along with their backend development partner.