As consumer electronics become easier to sell, there’s a lot of discussion about how important CES still is to the tech industry, even for top hardware makers. As TechCrunch’s John Biggs wrote just before last week’s event “It’s as if the big guys are now just going through the motions. And they are.”
But it appears that companies may have inadvertently stumbled upon the secret of keeping the yearly event relevant: celebrity meltdowns. It’s been a week since Michael Bay fled the stage after a teleprompter malfunction during Samsung’s presentation–an eternity in Internet time, even for viral content–but people are still talking about the incident. Videos of Bay’s mishap made the social media rounds again after Tina Fey mocked it during the Golden Globes tonight.
Fey’s parody was only a few seconds long and she didn’t actually run off the stage, but viewers immediately got the joke.
Michael Bay deserves some sympathy. Just because you are a world-famous director doesn’t mean you good at public speaking, but at least Bay has Optimus Prime to console him. Although most of the biggest WTF moments in CES history (like 2013′s Qualcomm freakshow) probably had PR people screaming afterward, they keep the event from becoming predictable and boring–which is important for all the smaller hardware companies that debut really amazing, creative and innovative products at Las Vegas every year.
