2017 CES: Your Elevator Speech.

Friday, January 6, 2017 Jan 6th 2017, 12:19, by TALKERS 2017 CES: Your Elevator Speech.  Media consultant Holland Cooke reports from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and he writes: Attention is currency. So short sentences rock. And sentence fragments. See? On a normal day in Las Vegas (oxymoron), it's already a wall of enticements: "100X odds craps!" "Celine!" A rib joint touts "The Best Rack on The Strip!" Guy Fieri's restaurant serves up "In Your Face Food & Booze." "Fire a Machine Gun!" "Girls! Girls! Girls!" Now, fly-in 165,000 of us, for-whose-attention 20,000 new products compete, and you're in the graduate school of messaging. Yours will drown in the din unless it's "SQUIRREL!" Sound familiar? Radio has never had more competition for listeners' attention, and advertisers' do-re-mi. So, as I navigate a Las Vegas Convention Center the size of FIFTY football fields, I am struck by how well exhibitors distill their messages, something radio hosts and commercial and promo copy should strive to do. BACtrack is "The World's First Wearable Alcohol Monitor." Mevo, The Live Event Camera, enables you to "Edit on the fly. Stream live or share later." ThinOptics assures that you will "never be without your reading glasses again." Their "stick anywhere, go everywhere" sleeve adheres to the back of your smartphone. Rem-Fit's Zeeq Smart Pillow "Streams Music, Stops Snoring, Analyzes Sleep." You're "always connected, never apart" with Petcube's "interactive cameras bringing pets and people closer than ever." Tablo is "The DVR for Cord Cutters." Assure Lock by Yale lets you "Lose your keys for good;" and "Answer your door. Anywhere. Anytime." MightyPURSE "charges your phone." Without a live demonstration in the booth, we'll take Willow's word that their "wearable breast pump" has "no external tubes, cords, or dangling bottles." Get the picture? Yes, we see. "Make America Great Again." We just elected a most unlikely president whose gift of brevity plays Twitter like a Stradivarius. "Drain the swamp," "Crooked Hillary," "Jeb Bush is weak," "Little Marco," "Build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it," and other bumpersticker-length catch-phrases were utterly digestible. Is your message? Holland Cooke (www.HollandCooke.com) is a media consultant working at the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet, and he covers industry conferences for Talkers. Follow him on Twitter @HollandCooke; and look for his new TalkersTV video "Choose Your Words Carefully" next week at Talkers.com Russian Hacking Controversy Tops Talkers TenTM for Week of January 2-6.  The debate in Washington over whether Vladimir Putin's Russia is responsible for hacking the DNC's email was the most-talked-about story on news/talk radio this week, landing atop the Talkers TenTM.  At #2 this week was President Obama's lame duck actions.  Coming in at #3 was the GOP's strategy to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, followed by the Chicago Facebook torture case at #4.  The Talkers TenTM is a weekly chart of the top stories and people discussed on news/talk radio during the week and is the result of ongoing research from TALKERS magazine.  It is published every Friday at Talkers.com.  View this week's entire chart here.