So...Which Brands Won CES 2015?

Last month, my employer Text100 in association with our partners Redshift Research and Brandwatch undertook a comprehensive study to help brands make the most of their investments in the 2015 International CES.

On January 7, the Text100 data team lookedat whichbrands were being discussed, which individuals or outlets drove conversations and which products were getting the getting the most mentions. Two days later, we dived into Intel’s dominant role in CES.

Today the team analyzes the same three criteria to see who took the honors for the show as a whole, and review changes in topics as the show progressed. Not surprisingly, 95.9 per cent of the mentions came through tweets, with the remainder in Facebook and in online news.

Brand champions

Intel dominated discussion with more than 48,000 mentions, almost double second-placed Samsung (who led discussions in our previous analysis). Product updates and a diversity initiative announcement contributed to the wider discussion. LG came in third with 25,000 mentions, mostly attributed to the G Flex 2 curved smartphone.

Apple jumped Sony to come in fourth, largely on the back of Apple Watch and Home Kit discussions. Panasonic and Toyota dropped out of the top 10, replaced by Betabrand and Razer, both with big jumps in mentions on  January 8. Betabrand’s partnership with Logitech generated more than 15,000 mentions while Razer’s jump can be attributed to its Razer Forge TV announcement.

Figure 1: Top Brands by Online Mention, CES 2015

Conversation drivers

@CNET, with more than 132 million impressions led CES online reach. Engadget (@engadget) moved from number 10 to second place, thanks in part to celebrity retweets from will.i.am (@iamwill) and Justine Ezarik (@iJustine) on January 7 and 8 respectively.

TV-personality, music producer and CES Entertainment Matters Ambassador, Nick Cannon (@NickCannon) came in third place for the show, largely on the back of tweets covering personal appearances. He was followed by @iamwill with 69 million impressions and media outlet @mashable with 66 million.

New to the top 10 is live streaming video platform Livestream (@livestream). They only mentioned CES directly 10 times during the show and vendors tagged them less than 150 times. However there were more than 62 million impressions generated through @mentions and retweets.

Figure 2: Top Media/Authors by Impressions, CES 2015

Products you want

The number one product mentioned over CES was LG’s Flex 2 with 12,500 mentions. The Flex 2 featured heavily in show recaps and benefited from being announced pre-show. The Apple Watch came in second place – with the yet-to-be available product being used as benchmark for all wearable announcements and benefiting from a range of clones that were available at the show.

Razer’s Forge TV came third with 6,746 mentions and the Lenovo ThinkPad came in fourth with almost 5,000 mentions (disclosure, Text100 is Lenovo’s agency of record). Samsung’s CES Best-of-Innovation award-winning SUHD TV rounded out the top five.

Figure 3: Top Products by Online Mention, CES 2015

Text100’s data team and our partners Redshift Research and Brandwatch will next manage a research exercise to assess consumer reaction to CES, compare this with mentions and impressions and develop a perspective on how brands can make the most out of their CES investment. More on this to come.

Methodology: Text100 used Brandwatch to monitor online news, Twitter, Facebook and discussion forums between January 5 and 10, 2015. We tracked and analyzed more than 675,000 US CES mentions over this period.

A version of this post appeared on Text100's HyperText blog on 13 January 2015