Marketing at CES: How Brands Can Stand Out

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the ultimate stage for tech innovation. It’s also a massive marketing spectacle. In 2025, CES drew over 141,000 attendees and 4,500 exhibitors, making it a launchpad for marketing ideas as much as products. 

For marketers, CES is a live case study in consumer electronics show marketing, showing which tactics capture attention on a global scale. Even if you’re watching from home, the CES playbook offers inspiration on how to tell a compelling story, design immersive experiences, and create lasting buzz around your brand.

Lessons Marketers Can Learn from CES 

CES is a masterclass in capturing attention, creating immersive experiences, and telling compelling brand stories. Marketers can apply these strategies to digital campaigns, ensuring their messages engage, resonate, and leave a lasting impression on their audience.

1. Storytelling Over Specs

Standout brands at CES didn’t merely highlight product features; they crafted compelling narratives that resonated emotionally with attendees. This approach not only engaged visitors but also fostered deeper connections and lasting impressions. Strong storytelling helps marketers build campaigns that create stronger brand recall.

At CES 2025, Bose hosted an exclusive event at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, transforming the venue into a cutting-edge branded space. The company utilized immersive soundscapes to demonstrate the capabilities of their audio products. They focused on creating environments where attendees could experience the products in action, rather than merely listing specifications.

2. Designing for Attention

At CES 2025, standout booths employed a strategic design approach that captured attention instantly with quick hooks, clear proof points, and deeper layers of detail. They guided visitors seamlessly through their brand narratives. This methodology, when translated to digital campaigns, ensures that content not only attracts but also retains audience engagement.

For example, in CES 2025, LG’s booth incorporated immersive storytelling through transparent OLED screens and sustainable design elements. They invited visitors to explore the brand’s commitment to innovation, affectionate intelligence, and environmental consciousness.

3. Creating Experiential Campaigns

Interactive demos and immersive displays make brands unforgettable on the CES floor. Translating that approach digitally creates campaigns that increase engagement, participation, and shareability.

At CES 2025, Brunswick showcased its Boating Intelligence initiative, blending digital and physical elements to enhance the boating experience. Their exhibit featured a 200-degree virtual boat helm simulator, introducing an AI-powered co-captain for assisted navigation and autonomous maneuvers. Additionally, attendees could virtually ride an electric hydrofoil using a handheld controller in a Fliteboard eFoil immersive simulator.

Nikon engaged CES 2025 attendees with an interactive experience where visitors could stand in front of a video background projected onto a giant LED screen and create their own weather forecast TV program, simulating a tornado scenario.

4. Real-Time Marketing in Action

Live updates, influencer coverage, and instant buzz dominate CES conversations. Acting in real time allows marketers to ride trending moments and stay at the center of the conversation.

Brands like Insta360 turned their booth demos into real-time marketing moments. At CES 2025, the company showcased its new X4 and GO 3S cameras live on the show floor, with staff walking audiences through 360-degree features while creators filmed and published content on the spot. Videos from the booth, like Charbax’s live demo, extended the immediacy of CES to global audiences. 

The lesson for marketers? Pair product launches or campaigns with real-time updates, creator collaborations, and instant content to stay at the center of the conversation.

5. Leveraging FOMO and Exclusivity

Invite-only previews, limited seats, and timed product unveilings at CES generate urgency. Applying similar tactics digitally boosts sign-ups, accelerates decision-making, and heightens customer excitement.

For example, BMW’s “Brings a ‘Little’ Las Vegas Magic to CES 2025” activation around the Neue Klasse featured staged press-conference performances and showings by comedian Tim Meadows at specific times. This was followed by repeat hourly shows at its Pavilion across the event days. These shows had limited seating, and attendees, including journalists and general CES visitors, could register in advance via BMW’s website. 

This created urgency, exclusivity, and heightened desirability, as not everyone would get in unless they opted in early. This helped BMW generate buzz, restrict access slightly, and build anticipation.

6. Omnichannel Consistency

Successful CES marketing connects in-person experiences with strong digital amplification. Carrying this consistency across channels ensures cohesive messaging and reinforces brand identity.

Many CES 2025-exhibiting brands design immersive booths, then match the same visual identity, copy tone, and key messages in social media, live streams, email blasts, and their website. 

They invest in lighting and stage design that reflect the campaign’s hero image, teaser videos before the show, live demos streamed online, and post-CES gallery emails, with all assets echoing the booth’s design. This kind of cross-channel alignment ensures that whether someone sees you at a physical booth or online, the brand feels unified, memorable, and trustworthy.

7. Segmentation and Personalization

CES marketers tailor communication for press, partners, and buyers differently. Doing the same digitally strengthens relationships, improves conversion rates, and builds long-term loyalty.

At CES, brands like Samsung and Panasonic issued press releases and keynotes for media outlets, hosted partner roundtables for collaborators, and held buyer-focused product demos, all using slightly different messaging and content styles. Digitally, this type of segmentation, sending feature-rich spec sheets for buyers, highlighting stories for press, and partnership case studies for partners, can help sharpen relevance and boost conversion.

8. Sustaining Momentum After CES

The CES playbook doesn’t end with the event in January. Top brands keep content flowing long after the show. This includes repurposing content such as publishing recap videos, blog posts, and photo galleries summarizing key announcements, and encouraging influencers to share wrap-ups.  Brands also send thank-you emails and social shareables to remind people what happened. 

Delta exemplified this after its CES 2025 Sphere keynote. CEO Ed Bastian emailed SkyMiles members with highlights, including Delta Concierge and the airline’s future vision. Meanwhile, photos, videos, and stories showcasing exclusive merch and member experiences were amplified on Delta’s News Hub and across media, extending impact and maximizing ROI.

CleverTap: Powering Meaningful Customer Engagement 

CES proves that creativity, timing, and connection set great brands apart, but to make that repeatable at scale, you need a platform built for it. CleverTap provides that foundation with a full engagement suite:

1. Segmentation and Personalization 

At CES, brands tailor experiences differently for press, partners, and consumers. CleverTap makes this possible at scale via digital media. With advanced segmentation, you can group users by behavior, demographics, or lifecycle stage. Imagine welcoming a first-time app user with an onboarding flow while simultaneously rewarding a VIP with early access offers. Every message feels relevant, boosting engagement and conversions.

2. Omnichannel Campaign Orchestration

CES campaigns succeed because their storytelling is consistent across booth design, live demos, and online buzz. CleverTap ensures the same omnichannel consistency for your digital strategy. From a single dashboard, marketers can orchestrate campaigns across push, in-app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and web. As a result, customers experience a seamless journey, no matter where they interact with your brand.

3. Real-Time Triggers and Automation

One reason CES is so powerful is that it takes immediate action in the form of live product launches, influencer reactions, and on-the-spot buzz. CleverTap enables you to bring that real-time responsiveness into your marketing. If a user abandons their cart, you can trigger an instant reminder with a personalized incentive. If they engage with a campaign, you can follow up right away with contextual content. The right timing turns curiosity into action.

4. Lifecycle Journeys

CES acts as a platform to begin the conversation. The strongest brands sustain it long after the show. CleverTap helps you map the entire customer journey, from onboarding to retention. Automated lifecycle campaigns nurture users at every stage, whether it’s guiding new sign-ups, upselling loyal customers, or re-engaging dormant ones. You can build complex, multi-step journeys that run on autopilot, freeing up your team while still driving growth.

5. Behavioral Analytics and Cohorts 

Finally, CleverTap gives marketers the same kind of insights CES exhibitors crave. It answers what drew attention, what worked, and what didn’t. With behavioral analytics, you can track how users interact with campaigns and segment them into cohorts. This allows continuous optimization, so that instead of guessing, you refine strategies based on real user behavior and outcomes.

Trusted by 2,000+ leading global brands, CleverTap helps marketers engage and retain millions of users every day in this way by bringing CES-level creativity and precision to digital campaigns. CleverTap’s real-time personalization and automation let teams deploy these strategies at scale, keeping their brand top-of-mind and delivering measurable results.

Make CES-level Impact Year-Round 

CES 2025 proved that the winners are those who blend vision with execution. They tell an emotional story, hook audiences instantly, invite participation, and harness real-time buzz to create FOMO. Crucially, they tie every touchpoint together across channels and follow up relentlessly after the event. 

Today’s marketing is built on faster execution and smarter targeting, powered by AI and data. In other words, even the most creative campaigns need a strong tech backbone. For marketers, the takeaway is to pair CES creativity with data-driven execution. CleverTap’s platform lets you capture attention, measure impact, and optimize your campaigns.