Choosing your best CES spokesperson
Yesterday, a fellow who makes a living depicting big explosions experienced one of his own. On an international stage. Film director Michael Bay, hired by tech giant Samsung to talk about next-generation ultra HD televisions, got tangled in his TelePrompTer readout, lost his place, and abruptly left the Samsung booth at CES. See it here. Michael Bay (photo by Romina Espinosa at http://www.rominaespinosa.com [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) Bay -- whose works include Armageddon and the Transformers series -- is well-known for his work behind the camera, not in front of it, or before a live audience. So choosing him as your spokesperson at the world's largest consumer electronics orgy seems, on its surface, a gamble. (The tie-in for Samsung was that Bay's next Transformers movie will be previewed on a Samsung UHD-TV .) There's some alchemy involved in choosing a frontman for a trade show like CES. He or she sho...