At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, bigger is always better.
The showcase for everything high-tech drew more than 3,800 exhibitors and 170,000 attendees to Sin City this year, including more than 50,000 people that came from outside the U.S. – a figure that included the first-ever Cuban delegation.
According to the Consumer Technology Association, upwards of 3,800 exhibitors from just about every industry imaginable took part in the show, doing their best to razzle-dazzle the throngs wandering through the nearly 2.5 million feet of exhibit space.
For companies vying to draw attention to their products, it’s very much a “go big or go home” mentality, according toJen Grant, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Las Vegas’s Elite Media, a company specializing in building wraps, billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising.
That “go big” mentality suits Elite just fine. For the second year in a row, they were hired by BMW to wrap theRenaissance Hotel, next door to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Grant says the hotel is “prime real estate” for drawing the eyeballs of CES attendees.
BMW purchased what Elite calls its “domination package” – four different wraps applied to the hotel and its adjacent parking garage.
“This is definitely our most time-consuming wrap,” she says.
The hotel’s north wall is 113 feet tall by 185 feet wide. The first step is to “black out” the entire wall with a bottom layer of perforated adhesive film and then another layer containing the advertising message is applied. The materials used must allow people to see out the windows and still be capable of withstanding the near-hurricane-strength wind gusts that occasionally blow through that desert oasis.
What Grant calls the “apex” of the hotel – the curved part in the photo – is another oversized challenge at 105 feet tall and almost 57 feet wide. Other advertisements were placed on the south wall of the hotel – 113 feet tall by 85 feet wide – and then the parking structure, which is covered in a mesh vinyl.
She said her company has owned exclusive rights to wrap the Renaissance since 2005, and it wraps the hotel about six times a year.
“But CES is definitely one of our largest conventions,” Grant says.
Elite Media has been around since 2002 and it also owns exclusive rights to wrap the Rosen Centre Hotel next to theOrange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.
The company is a full-service outdoor advertising firm whose high-profile clients have included the Las Vegas Monorail, the Luxor Hotel Casino and the Stratosphere Casino, Hotel and Tower.
But the BMW job on the Renaissance for CES takes a full month, Grant says, with two weeks required just to print the materials and another two for the installation. By comparison, wrapping the nearby Marriott, which Elite also owns exclusive rights to, takes just two days.