In February, I wrote a column previewing the Jacobs Media annual CES webinar. In preparing for that column, I conducted a far-ranging interview with Jacobs Media President, Fred Jacobs. Over the last four decades, Jacobs has been one of the most important and influential people in the radio industry.
During the interview, he told some stories that I hadn’t seen or heard elsewhere. In other instances, he added details that were previously unknown. Jacobs also goes into substantially more detail about CES and AI than I could present in the prior column.
Recently I posted the transcript of the first half of our conversation. If you didn’t catch it, you can catch up here.
This week, we present the second half of my conversation with Fred Jacobs.
Andy Bloom: What gives you hope for the industry? You’ve given me a little taste of it with IBiquity, Xperia, and the automakers. Do you want to elaborate any more on that?
Fred Jacobs: What would give me more hope is if there were more people from the radio broadcasting industry going to this event every year and sucking in the perspective that we get. In the same way it was hard for Buzz Knight to explain it to me, it’s hard for me to explain to other people why this event is so important in shaping your thinking. It’s not just seeing an exhibit and going oh, I wonder if there’s a radio in the co*ckpit of that car. It’s actually seeing the larger theme and wondering ‘Hey are there things we can do on the air to create a more personalized or customized experience for our customers?’
That’s a big theme that we see across many platforms and many different areas at CES. It again becomes more thematic than anything else.
There is no way you can spend three days the first week of January at CES and not come back to your market pumped up, excited, and enthused about some of the things that even radio, in the condition that it is today, can do more to reflect the consumer experience with media and everything else.
It’s hard to explain to people who go to the NAB every year, and I’m not knocking the NAB. it’s a wonderful conference. It’s great to get together with your peers and look at transmitters and stuff. I think it’s important to go to a different event every year. As long as you’re going to commit to do that, you may as well go to this one.
AB: I know you well enough to know that you’re primarily a pessimist and yet you come away from this sounding optimistic.
FJ: Yeah, I am optimistic because I think, for smart enlightened people who are willing to see the world — not through the same lens that they’ve been seeing it through for decades, but the lens of what is going on out there now. I’ve gotten to know Jerry Lee extremely well. I’ve been to 15 CESs, Jerry’s been to like 54. I have breakfast with him every year, and it’s great. He’s a mentor to me, like my Yoda.
He is so smart and he’s thinking all the time. I think CES, to a great degree, has informed the way he thinks about the industry and its potential. I asked him a number of years ago; ‘Why do you do this every year?’ I think he’s 87 years old.
Andy, this is a really difficult emotional event to go to. It’s crowded. It’s noisy. It’s like being in a subway for three days. It’s Exhilarating but it is taxing, and it’s really hard to do. I said to him; ‘Why do you do this every year?’ He looked me right in the eye without even giving it a thought and said, ‘Because I don’t want to miss the future.’
Radio has such a rich history. We still have a lot of ubiquity usage. There’s an awful lot of radios out there all over the place. It’s not like it used to be but it’s still better than so many other Industries and organizations. We have a tremendous foundation from which to get to the next place if we’re open-minded enough, adaptable enough, and resilient enough to be able to take advantage of it. So yeah, I am guardedly optimistic.
AB: Tell me about the webinar on Thursday and especially as you’ve hinted at least that it might be different this year. There might be something different about it. Can you give us an idea of what to expect on the webinar and what will be different than if you’ve watched a Jacobs CES Webinar in the past?
FJ: Typically, what I do is a compartmentalized almost topic-by-topic breakdown of what we saw. They’re working on the dashboard. So, here’s five six minutes on that with a bunch of pretty cars flying by and video or whatever. There were robots, so there will be a little section on robots. There was AI and the Metaverse. AI was such a huge part of this this year we’re creating sort of like an AI pullout.
We just hired Chris Brunt, who’s a guy we’ve worked with for a number of years. He’s a former program director who went to work for Greater Media, Detroit than Beasley, in the Digital programming department content creation department first and then digital revenue. Chris is becoming our AI point person. I’m going to flip it over to him at a point in the webinar, and he’s going to go in an in-depth, but hopefully not too wonky, direction about what’s going on there.
The weird thing about AI is there’s not an AI exhibit or an AI room or even gadgets per se AI is like oxygen at this event. It just permeates everything, everywhere and it’s fascinating to watch companies integrate it into what they’re doing. Some of this stuff dovetails into applications that any of us as individuals can use and certainly as radio stations could. And you know the thing to me that’s been lamentable about the past year in radio is that most of the AI conversation has been that hair on fire, oh my God, is this going to replace more DJs?
I understand the paranoia, it is well placed. There easily could be job losses down the road, but there could be job gains down the road too if radio people committed themselves to learning AI, its principles, its usage, and figure out a way to make it work for stations and people individually. We’re going to talk a lot about that in the webinar.
Google built, I call it the Google house, in the central plaza, which at the NAB is like a parking lot. At CES it’s the home of about maybe a dozen companies that literally build buildings just for the three days of CES and then they take them down. It’s a great location, that Google has been there now for probably for seven or eight years. Every year the Google house is a little different.
One year they built like a theme park ride, like a Disney ride. This year was all about how Google is using AI to help companies do what they do better more efficiently and more effectively at everything from video editing to program manipulation to everything else and there’s some great stuff for digital content creators.
This (webinar) is going to be less about the laundry list of stuff we saw at CES and more of a thematic presentation, and AI is going to be at the center of it.
Next to the Google house was the Walmart house. This was the first year that Walmart has ever exhibited at CES. To their credit, they went all out. They did a keynote. They had tremendous visibility at CES. There we are. We go through the Google house and we’re looking at each other and thinking are we going to go into the Walmart house or not? I’m thinking what could possibly be there that would be of interest to me and radio people (laughs). In spite of my misgivings, we went into the Walmart house.
It was a mindblower, Andy. It was so freaking cool. They’ve got tremendous technology. It is B2B, the logistics of getting stuff from store to store, and from factories to stores. Using AI enabled apps to point your f*cking bots to the top of a heap, and your phone displays what’s inside the box. Cool innovations like that to make it easier to shop at Sam’s Club by not having to deal with cashiers, stuff like that. Drone delivered goods, which Walmart is all into now.
That thought I had, and this is indicative of some of the bigger themes, if I had a similar store to Walmart, like Target or Costco, and I walked through the Walmart house at CES, I would be really concerned that maybe our company is falling behind when it comes to technology and specifically AI applications. It was that good.
CES is a really collegial fun event, unlike some of our radio conferences, that have their ups and downs. Some people are negative, others are upbeat. At CES, nobody is negative, everybody is optimistic. Everybody is feeling good. Everybody is excited about the future and talk to people, even people you don’t know.
Inevitably, Walmart comes up and a lot of people had the same takeaway that they went in thinking: ‘Eh? What’s Walmart doing here,’ or ‘I never shop at Walmart, why would I care?’ Thirty minutes later walking out of the Walmart house going, ‘Holy crap! This is really good.’
AB: Anything else to tease the webinar?
FJ: We’re going to have some interactive things going on – little polls. Getting attendee reaction to what we’re showing. We’ve done it before but just with one question. We’re looking at doing something a little more interactive than that. So, you won’t be able to just lean back at your desk or the conference room table. We are going to ask you to engage in some of the content we’re showing.
AB: The last thing I want to cover, without giving it all away, can you give me a preview of the coolest gadgets or technology, or even themes you saw this year?
FJ: We went to Sphere. It has nothing to do with CES, but it has everything to do with CES. It’s a completely innovative way to go to an arena concert event. We didn’t see a concert, but we saw that film by Darren Aronofsky “Postcard from Earth,” which is beautifully done. It’s an amazing experience. It turned out to be a pivotal part of the tour this year. It’s a confluence of media technology and event. It was mind blowing – every bit as cool as I thought it was going to be.
We normally do a steak dinner at the Capital Grille for all our tour attendees. We decided to pivot and do an evening at Sphere. I think it worked out really well. People were excited about it and can’t wait to go back. For the foreseeable future it will be part of our tour.
As for the gadget, people are going to laugh when they read this but, for the last three or four years there have been flying cars on display – pretty much right out of the Jetsons. Most of the early models looked like drones with co*ckpits big enough for one person. So, what’s the application for these things?
In theory, you fly into LaGuardia and instead of having to get a taxi or Uber to get to Midtown, you would jump into one of these things and fly to your destination in Manhattan.
I know there’s all kinds of barriers and concerns with this…
AB:(Laughing) You think?
FJ: Right, the imagination runs wild with all the sh*t that can go wrong here. This is technology that just keeps growing.
This year, of all the things I liked best, there was a Chinese company called XPENG the CEO address one of our tours. What makes it unique is that when it’s on the ground it’s a regular car. It has four propellers that retract much like how the top of a convertible folds into the trunk. When it’s on the ground and can be driven like a regular car. Imagine flying into LaGuardia, then hoping into XPENG and avoid the snarling traffic in Queens and Manhattan so you can land in Midtown.
The second coolest thing we saw is a robot barista-bartender that tells jokes and uses AI to recognize you and predict your order favorite. Its name is Adam. Right now it’s mainly for renting out for parties and things like that.
AB: Fred, thank you for your time. We’ll see you at the webinar.
