CES 2019 recently took place, and we looked back in the data to determine which brands got the most engagement and attention from the event.
The Consumer Electronics Show, better known to most of the world simply as CES, took place in Las Vegas in early January of this year.
We looked back at the data to determine which publishers writing about new technology at CES drove the most engagement, and which brands exactly it was that they wrote about that drove those engagements.
Let’s look a little deeper.
Who wrote about CES?
Fox News and its subsidiary local publishers were by far the most engaged of the publishers writing about CES this year, with Chicago’s WGN-TV also doing particularly well.
Specialist tech websites such as The Verge and CNET also ranked in the top ten with 150,000 and 100,000 engagements respectively.
Interestingly, Lenovo’s promotion of its own technology and products drove the second most engagements of any web publisher with 278,000 engagements on their website.
CES was an event that did particularly well for local news outlets, especially when compared with some of their larger peers. At the top of the list were Fox’s local outlets, thanks largely to repeated content about a Samsung TV.
Which brands drove engagement about CES on the web?
Looking at the top ten stories, a clear winner emerges in terms of the engagements driven over the course of the week.
Samsung’s new 219 inch television, which they call ‘The Wall’, was featured in six of the top ten stories, driving more than a million engagements in the process.
Other stories that resonated were about Tesla’s self-driving car ‘killing’ a robot, which featured in two stories, and some backlash over a sex toy controversy was the final story in the list.
To mitigate Samsung’s dominance in the list, we ranked the data to build a list of only the top story about each brand. One of the top stories was a list, but it also featured smart diapers and Netflix news.
Panasonic and IBM all moved into the most engaged stories, with the next wave of technology such as the advent of 5G and IBM unveiling one of the next generations of computer, its very first commercial quantum computer.
All of these stories, even at the lower end of the scale, drove tens of thousands of engagements. Most of the stories were positive press for the brands, although Tesla’s self-driving car broke the mold for this in its robot killing story.
Which brands drove engagement about CES on Facebook?
Brands were much more responsible for driving the conversation on Facebook than they were on the web, with six of the top ten Facebook Pages that published posts about CES being brands, namely Lenovo, Bosch, DTS, Mercedes Benz, Hyundai, and LG.
The top Page was Lenovo, which drove more than 400,000 engagements on its CES announcement post. Bosch and DTS, both audio system companies, were second and third respectively in the list, all coming comfortably above 9Gag, which was the top Publisher on Facebook with just over 100,000 engagements. The Verge was the only tech publisher whose Facebook Page featured in the top ten Pages.
Most of the top posts came from the brands showing off or announcing their product offering, Â though four publishers also featured towards the lower end of the top ten.
Lenovo was responsible for the top two posts, announcing a new X1 Carbon and promoting their innovations more generally. DTS and Bosch teased the demos they would be doing on their Facebook Pages in advance, garnering significant engagement in the process.
Because the top brands tended to dominate the conversation a bit, we also limited our dataset to brands only, and limited it by the top post of each brand’s Page. Lenovo, DTS, Bosch, and LG remain the top four, but auto brands also begin to come into the conversation.
Hyundai, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz drove tens of thousands of engagements each with their concept cars and prototype announcements for new vehicles. Semiconductor company AMD rounded out the top ten with announcements of their new microprocessors, specifically highlighting their utility in gaming.
The top three posts were all photos, whereas the rest of the top ten were native videos.
In summary, in brand terms, CES was a success story on social for a number of the tech brands, especially Lenovo and Samsung, but also including audio brands such as DTS and Bosch. Auto brands were also featured, though significantly less so than their more tech-focused competitors.
In terms of who drove the coverage, local news websites drove a surprising amount of interactions, as did tech publishers such as The Verge and CNET.
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