Sharp Electronics CES Experience

The Setup

CES is one of the most crowded rooms in the world. More than 150,000 people move through the Las Vegas Convention Center in four days, and every booth is competing for the same few seconds of attention. Sharp needed a reason for people to stop at their booth, and a way to turn that brief visit into a lasting connection on social media.

The idea was Sharp Faces in the Crowd. We lined the booth with six 90″ AQUOS smart TVs and brought in caricature artists who drew directly on the screens. Every portrait doubled as a live product demo — the bigger and brighter the TV, the better the show. People lined up to get drawn, and the crowd that gathered to watch became its own draw.

What I Led

I was creative director, designer and developer on Sharp Faces in the Crowd. I led the concept from pitch through the show floor, designed the web experience and the booth flow, and built the application myself — the guest sign-up, the assistant’s iPad tool for matching artwork to each guest, the real-time gallery and the virtual tour.

What We Delivered

A custom web experience connected everything happening in the booth:

Sign-up. Guests registered at a kiosk with a public username, their name and their email. Inline validation caught missing or mistyped fields before anyone stepped out of line.

Drawing. Artists drew each caricature live on the 90″ displays, then saved the finished piece to a shared directory.

Matching. A booth assistant working on an iPad matched each image to the right guest. The submit button stayed locked until an image was connected, which kept the wrong face from ending up with the wrong person.

Sharing. Once submitted, the caricature appeared in the live gallery in real time. From there, guests could share their artwork to their own social feeds with a small, unobtrusive message from Sharp attached.

Beyond the booth. The web experience also worked for people who couldn’t make it to Las Vegas. A virtual tour of CES brought the show to them with 360° product views, live interviews and live streams of the keynote speeches. Alongside it, a product lineup section and the “See the bigger picture” print campaign pointed visitors back to the booth and to Sharp’s largest LED TVs.

Outcomes

Over the four days of the show, our artists drew an estimated 1,500 caricatures across the six 90″ displays. Roughly two-thirds of the guests — about 1,000 people — shared their portrait to their social feeds, each post carrying Sharp’s message to their friends and followers. The line at the booth rarely emptied, and the crowd that gathered to watch the artists work kept the 90″ screens on display all day.