Sleep Is For The Week
Remember what I said a month or two ago about not being able to sleep well in hotel rooms or new places for the first night? Apparently, that’s all bullshit, as I fell asleep as soon as the light was out last night (around 9 PM). While it was a sleep punctuated by weird dreams (probably due to the unfortunate and rapidly-procured Sbarro dinner last night), it was sleep nonetheless, and it was wonderful after such a long and stressful day.
I arrived in Las Vegas on time yesterday morning and jumped right into a taxi bound for the convention center (it was too early to check into the hotel and I had my setup to do). Upon arriving, I made my way to the show floor and our immense booth. After navigating my way to our specific booth-within-the-booth area, I encountered almost exactly what I had hoped to see: 5 HDTVs, 3 PlayStation 3s, 2 standalone Blu-ray players, a bunch of controllers, a laptop, and most of our proper signage, all assembled on our booth’s wall. Since this was scheduled to be completed prior to my arrival, I was glad to see that the basic foundation of our booth was mostly there.
As I’ve said before, for CES, every company within our greater corporate overlord (our movie division, the television division, the electronics division, the gaming division, the music division, the corporate part, etc.) gets put under the control of the electronics division, as this show is really their showcase. 75% of the booth is dedicated to electronics (understandable, given that it is the Consumer Electronics Show) and they do all of the hard work with regards to the planning and construction of the overall experience. However, within that larger booth is, as I’ve said, our booth (and booths from each division…sometimes more than a booth, what with the television division’s massive Jeopardy stage, from which they’re broadcasting during the show), which is reflective of our messaging and is paid for by our money. It’s the fact that the booth as a whole is dictated by the electronics group while our section of the booth is strictly our messaging and content that sometimes creates some friction.
When I went to San Diego last month, I sat in that two-day meeting with the key people from the electronics division who are running the booth as a whole, and just like last year, they started to insist that we hire someone to help out at the booth (in addition to me, to cover my breaks and such). We pushed back and said, no, I’ll be at the booth, we won’t hire anyone, but we’ll have some of our people cover my breaks. There were other issues there, but we mostly smoothed them out. But anyway, again just like last year, I showed up at the booth to find that a trainer from the electronics division has been assigned to our booth to help out, free of charge (last year, we did hire someone to help, and we still got one of these free-of-charge guys provided, too…it’s bizarre).
But the trainer last year was quite nice, and this year’s model is equally delightful (his name is Rick, he’s incredibly helpful). Anyway, to finally get to the point, the idea behind yesterday was to finalize every section of the overall booth, and then those key electronics people would walk around and “certify” everyone who was working on the show floor, to see if they know their stuff about their respective booths. You’re literally not supposed to leave the floor until you’re certified.
While I didn’t think that I was “above the law,” it did also seem a) like this “certification” process only applied to those who came in to help out and the staff from the electronics division, and b) like a waste of time to certify me…are they going to tell me that I’m wrong about how our division is positioning a certain product? I made all of the content in this booth…what’s to certify? I could get up there and say, “This year, we’re releasing Ishtar in a 3-disc Blu-ray special edition”…who are they to argue? They don’t know. Rick agreed, and since I hadn’t yet checked into my hotel and was already starting to lose my voice (I trained him for about three hours), it was determined that I would leave, possibly not to return. Most everything seemed to be working, and the stuff that was missing was being sourced.
At 3 PM (after about fifteen minutes of a nap), I got a call from Rick saying that they refused to certify just him…it had to be both of us. I rushed back, arrived at around 3:30...and they finally came back to certify us at 6:30. Of course, it’s actually good that I came back: in my absence, it was determined that no one had provided us with a needed PSP (for a Digital Copy demonstration), we were still missing some crucial signage, people were trying to add things to our booth (not cool, we never agreed on having those things on our booth wall), and the TVs all started to default back to their non-optimized settings after five minutes, and no one knew how to stop them from doing that. So in those three hours, I scrambled around to address these issues, and by 6:30, they were mostly all resolved.
I’d like to say that I went out on the town after that, but I didn’t. I was so tired that I just came back to the hotel, ate my wretched “Italian” dinner and went to sleep. Today, though, isn’t so bad: I’m free until 3 PM, when I have to go over and man the booth for tonight’s press event (the show officially opens tomorrow, but tonight, the press get a sneak peek). And then the show itself starts bright and early tomorrow morning…I dread. I still don’t know if everything will work as planned…it seemed to go well yesterday, but there are certain key elements that are up in the air (Digital Copy, chat, etc.). But for now, I’m off to source some breakfast…not the easiest thing to do on the Strip in Las Vegas. That’s one thing I dislike about Vegas: it’s not easy to just go get some basic food. You either have to go to some crappy food court or you have to sit down at a restaurant. Lame.
