CEA Demo Days Event for One Independent Hits App Snag

CHESTERFIELD, Mo. -- A CEA-sponsored Demo Days event, “Catch Football Fever Like Never Before,” hit a surprising snag at the independent AV specialist The Sound Room last week when store staffers discovered that the featured football app providing stats, player pictures and score updates was available exclusively only on Samsung TVs. For The Sound Room, the problem was that the retailer doesn’t carry Samsung TVs, and President David Young told us it wasn’t worth bringing in several Samsung models to show off the football app just for the event held on Friday and Saturday.

To trumpet the Demo Days event, The Sound Room sent a “Save the Date” email to customers on Aug. 6, using email templates supplied by CEA’s marketing firm Revenew Systems with the message “Don’t miss your chance to kick off the football season right.” In addition to the football theme, the messaging informed customers they could “connect seamlessly with integration of the latest mobile device features,” “view your favorite online movies and shows” and “listen to your favorite music from services like Pandora.” To entice customers to take part in Demo Days, Revenew sponsored an iPad giveaway for consumers who registered, with one winner to be selected. Young said 30-40 customers registered for the event through the Sound Room email. Another showed up at the store Saturday morning to sign up for the iPad giveaway.

The Sound Room only learned last week that the ESPN-sourced app used as the model for the marketing material was exclusive to Samsung, staffers told us. Kerry Moyer, senior director at CEA, said the generic TV in the marketing material didn’t come across as a Samsung model, but the people who designed the ad modeled it after a Samsung TV when creating the promo material. “They tried to make it generic enough,” Moyer said, “but they didn’t realize that some of that information could only be accessed through a proprietary Samsung ESPN application.” Moyer “didn’t feel too bad about” Samsung getting the implied endorsement because Samsung “was the only TV company that stepped up to be a sponsor” for the Demo Days event, and ESPN, too, has been a Demo Days sponsor, he said. Regarding the fact that no one knew that the ESPN app was a Samsung exclusive, Moyer said, “Sometimes you nail it and sometimes you don’t ... but anything you can do to create some plus business is a bonus."

Moyer said the information available through the ESPN app can be found “by simply hooking up any smart TV to the Internet,” saying sometimes a direct route to the Internet rather than through an app, can actually be faster than through an app. That’s likely true on some connected TVs and not others, depending on the amount of direct access consumers have to the Internet from a given TV. Manufacturers have taken different approaches, in some cases creating a “walled garden” strategy to avoid viruses.

With the ESPN football app not an option on the The Sound Room’s Sony, Panasonic and Sharp TVs, The Sound Room switched gears and showed NFL Network programming from the local cable company on its statement Sharp 90-inch LC-90LE745U TV. The improvised Demo Days connected TV event at The Sound Room was a Skype demo that staffers set up with a 65-inch Sony TV rigged with a Sony webcam that linked to an HP all-in-one PC in another section of the store. Young chose Skype as the featured app because “it’s the most relevant."

One unintended message about connected TV that would have come across whether The Sound Room was demoing the promised football app or a Skype app was the tenuous nature of a wireless network. Although the Skype demo was working when we arrived soon after the store opened, the wireless network went down about midstream bringing up the on-screen message “Skype call failed. Network appears to be down.” Salesman Gary Luaders said, “That’s the problem with a store like this: We have so many networked devices that we popped off the network."

After a period of time in which the message, “Searching for available wireless network,” appeared onscreen, the connection came back to life with a reboot, but navigating the Sony TV menu system for Skype wasn’t the kind of smooth experience that would make a customer want to embrace Skype on TV. Another snag, this one specific to Skype, was the starkly different quality of resolution between the hi-res Sony webcam and the low-res webcam built into the HP monitor. The Sony webcam was designed for viewing on a big-screen TV and the HP webcam appeared to be best suited for a window on a PC monitor. Viewing the HP-shot material on the Sony 65-inch was a bit like enlarging a 1-megapixel image to a poster-size print.

Roughly 100 CEA member dealers took part in Demo Days in the U.S. and Canada out of a potential field of about 400 specialty dealers, Moyer told us. The program was available to all CEA dealer members, Moyer said. Some of the participating dealers were “in flux with some of the buying groups,” Moyer said, and CEA allowed them to participate as well. This is the third year CEA has sponsored Demo Days and the football event was the middle of three events running this summer, sandwiched by an Olympics-themed event last month and a September event to promote step-up audio systems. The goal of all the demo events is “to increase store traffic,” Moyer said, which CEA does through a dual-pronged marketing effort.

At the national level, CEA sponsors a satellite media tour and social media marketing, directing consumers to its http://ceademodays.com website where dealers who have opted in can be listed in the dealer locator section. On the local front, CEA supplies dealers with “tool kits,” including templates for direct mail, email, Facebook and banner ads, which CEA values at $2,500. Dealers’ only cash outlay is for printing costs, Moyer said. CEA’s budget for Demo Days is “just under $100,000,” Moyer said, not including the costs of the satellite media tour.

Also part of the toolkits are demo discs with content that helps sell the big-screen experience. Blu-ray discs with highlights from the Beijing Olympics comprised the demo material for the Demo Days event in July, and highlights from the New York Giants’ 2012 Super Bowl win was the content for last weekend’s football event, Moyer said. He conceded that the appeal of the first disc was likely far more widespread than the second, which “probably didn’t play well in Dallas.” The final Demo Days weekend, Sept. 14-17, will be themed “Bring your own device,” where consumers are encouraged to bring their iPhone or iPod or other music device to hear how it sounds through a music dock, a high-end music system or a whole-house system, Moyer said.

Regarding the fragile nature of wireless networks and the demo challenges they present on the sales floor, Moyer said one of CEA’s missions is to pave the way for new technology, both through promotions and on the legislative and technical standards sides to “make sure there’s better interoperability and performance.” Increasing spectrum is one of CEA’s issues, Moyer said, and “sometimes when a network goes down, it’s a result of too much going on through a limited pipe.” By opening that pipe through more spectrum, “we'll be better,” he said.

Young said he was pleased with the 30-40 registrants that The Sound Room signed up for the event, and Moyer praised the number of showroom-based retailers participating, estimating that 40-50 percent of eligible dealers took part. “It was all about trying to help the showroom-based retailer to get some footprints in the store,” he said. “If we can generate one or two sales and generate some traffic, then it’s a bonus for everyone.”