Saturday night at the karaoke bar in Southeast, the host who calls everyone baby asked what I did for a living, and when I said brand strategy he asked whether I was supposed to be in Las Vegas. Fair question. I was not. Neither were Amazon, GM, T-Mobile, or Meta, all of whom pulled their CES footprints in the weeks before the show as omicron numbers went vertical.
The show ran anyway, January 5th through the 8th, with a floor that people described as roomy in a way trade show floors are never supposed to be.
And then the strangest thing happened. Nothing. The categories those companies compete in did not pause. Products still shipped, partnerships still got announced, the press still wrote about consumer tech. The absence was noted for about seventy-two hours and then the industry moved on without visibly missing a step.
If your biggest competitors can skip the most important week of your calendar and the market does not notice, that week was a habit wearing the costume of a strategy.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The trade show line item is the one nobody interrogates, because it is old, because a senior person has a relationship with it, and because the counterfactual is invisible. You cannot prove what would have happened if you had spent that budget on anything else. So the booth gets renewed, year after year, on the strength of not having been questioned.
This year gave a lot of companies an accidental control group, and the honest ones will look at the data.
Ask three things. One, what did the show actually produce last time, in named accounts and signed conversations, not in badge scans and impressions. Two, could the same outcome have been bought some other way, because a category-defining launch film costs less than a booth and lasts longer than four days. Three, who is the show for, your customers or your own executives, because those are different budgets and only one of them should be called marketing.
None of this means the trade show is dead. Physical presence still does something no channel replaces: it puts your people in a room with people who care about the same narrow thing. That is real. But it has to earn its place against the alternatives every year rather than inherit it.
The booth gets renewed, year after year, on the strength of not having been questioned.
The absent brands will be back, most of them, and the show will fill up again. The useful part is the record: a year when the biggest names sat out and the category kept moving.
I sang badly, with commitment, and got home late. Barnaby was waiting by the door, entirely uninterested in what happened in Las Vegas.