This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.
CES 2025 and CES 2024: What Stood Out
This article covers two Consumer Electronics Show events: a look at Scope3, one of the standout companies from CES 2025 focused on digital advertising sustainability, and a product roundup from CES 2024 covering both major brand announcements and Innovation Award winners.
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Part 1: Scope3 at CES 2025 — Digital Advertising's Carbon Problem
The Hidden Environmental Cost of Digital Advertising
Data center power consumption has been growing rapidly with the expansion of digital services. McKinsey's projections suggest US data centers will consume 580 terawatt-hours annually by 2028 — equivalent to the combined electricity consumption of California, Texas, and New Jersey.
Digital advertising contributes meaningfully to that total. Every ad impression — from the programmatic auction to the delivery and tracking — involves server compute at multiple points in the chain. The cumulative carbon footprint of digital advertising at scale is substantial, but until recently there was no widely adopted methodology for measuring it with precision.
Scope3's Approach
Scope3, founded by Brian O'Kelley (one of the early architects of programmatic advertising), has built a platform that does two things: it measures the carbon emissions attributable to a given company's advertising spend with advertiser-level granularity, and it optimizes the advertising delivery to reduce those emissions without sacrificing performance.
O'Kelley's key claim, shared at CES 2025: companies using Scope3's platform have achieved average performance improvements of 10-15% alongside carbon emission reductions of 30-50%.
The mechanism is that a significant share of digital advertising spend is being delivered to low-quality placements — sites and formats that generate impressions but limited real engagement. That traffic also consumes server resources for minimal return. Cutting low-quality traffic reduces carbon emissions and improves performance simultaneously. The waste, in other words, is both financial and environmental.
AI and the Sustainability Tradeoff
O'Kelley's view on AI in the advertising context is nuanced. AI improves targeting efficiency — reducing wasted impressions by better matching ads to audiences who are more likely to respond. But AI inference also consumes significant compute, which means more power consumption.
His position: "Using AI to improve advertising effectiveness is legitimate, but consuming more power than necessary in the process defeats the purpose. AI use needs to be calibrated against actual efficiency gains."
He also raised the policy dimension: as awareness of AI's energy consumption grows among users and policymakers, demand-side policy interventions and government energy policy could shape how and where AI is deployed. The industry benefit of establishing sustainable practices early, before regulation forces the issue, is significant.
Summary: What Scope3 Offers
- Carbon measurement at advertiser spend level
- Optimization to reduce low-quality placements (both a performance and carbon win)
- 10-15% performance improvement, 30-50% carbon reduction documented in client cases
- Framework for thinking about AI efficiency tradeoffs in advertising
References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YixAhLhtzHY | https://scope3.com/
Part 2: CES 2024 — Notable Products and Innovation Awards
Major Brand Announcements
NVIDIA: The CES 2024 NVIDIA keynote (beginning at midnight Japan time on January 9) focused on AI and content creation — reflecting where the company's growth has come from and where it is headed. NVIDIA's dominant position in AI compute has made the company one of the defining technology stories of this era, and the CES appearance reinforced that positioning.
LG: Announced new OLED TV lineup featuring AI processors that significantly improve image and audio processing quality. The CES event also covered home and mobility products.
Panasonic: Distinguished itself with a focus on energy and climate policy — a different angle from the AI-centric announcements from most other exhibitors.
Honda and the Afeela (Honda-Sony): Honda announced a new EV series and provided additional detail on Afeela, the joint brand developed with Sony that was first shown at CES 2023. The Honda-Sony collaboration combines Honda's vehicle manufacturing with Sony's electronics and software expertise.
Sennheiser: New headphone product announcements at CES, drawing attention in the audio technology segment.
Hyundai: Updated the Supernal eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) concept, first shown at CES 2020. The program reflects Hyundai's commitment to next-generation mobility that extends beyond traditional ground vehicles.
Samsung: AI applications across kitchen appliances and robotic vacuums were expected. Notably, Samsung chose not to announce the Galaxy AI at CES — that announcement was held for a separate event, scheduled for January 18 Japan time.
Other Notable Products
Belkin: Automatic tracking stand for iPhone — a practical accessory for content creators doing solo video.
Eve Energy: Three new Matter-enabled smart home devices designed to make homes more energy-efficient. Matter is the smart home interoperability standard that is enabling more consistent cross-brand device integration.
Smeg: High-performance blender with multiple automatic programs — a premium kitchen appliance from a brand known for distinctive design.
LG AI Agent: A robot assistant concept that represents LG's hardware approach to AI-powered home assistance.
Razer Blade 16: The world's first 16-inch laptop with a 240Hz OLED display — a significant specification milestone for gaming and professional use.
Microsoft: A redesigned PC keyboard with a dedicated AI button replacing the traditional menu key. This is a meaningful UI change — the first new key added to the standard PC keyboard layout in over 25 years.
Qualcomm XR2 Plus Gen 2: A new chip supporting 4.3K resolution per eye at 90fps, aimed at high-end VR and AR applications. This represents meaningful progress toward the visual fidelity threshold where VR experiences become comparable to real life.
CES 2024 Innovation Awards: Selected Winners
AirFarm (Midbar Inc.): The world's first inflatable farm system — designed to enable food production anywhere, without the heavy steel infrastructure of conventional greenhouses. A built-in atmospheric water generation system extracts moisture from air in real time. This wins on both food security and infrastructure portability.
Link: https://www.ces.tech/innovation-awards/honorees/2024/best-of/a/airfarm.aspx
AirJet Mini (Frore Systems): World's first solid-state active cooling chip for electronics. Traditional cooling relies on fans and heat sinks; solid-state cooling eliminates moving parts. This could reshape how thin devices manage heat — particularly relevant for AI-capable laptops and mobile devices where heat management is a key design constraint.
AVEIR DR Leadless Pacemaker (Abbott): World's first dual-chamber leadless cardiac pacemaker system — treating patients with abnormally slow heart rhythms using a device implanted directly in the heart without traditional leads. A significant advance in cardiac care technology.
BOSE QuietComfort Ultra Headphones: BOSE's flagship headphone featuring the debut of BOSE Immersive Audio — a spatial audio system designed to bring a new level of realism to personal listening.
FINTIN V1 (Onecom Inc.): A Braille-compatible QWERTY communicator for visually impaired users — 6 tactile keys process 36 key inputs, enabling efficient typing for accessing digital information on smartphones. An accessibility-first product.
Gun Detection System (Bosch): A system combining video and audio AI to proactively detect weapons — particularly designed for environments like schools. The system is invisible in deployment, adding a layer of security that does not require visible cameras to be effective.
Link: https://www.ces.tech/innovation-awards/honorees/2024/best-of/g/gun-detection-system.aspx
Hestia (Vaonis): A portable telescope designed to use the smartphone sensor as the image capture device — using the phone's zoom capability up to 25x for capturing the sun, moon, and space objects. This makes astrophotography accessible without specialized camera equipment.
Link: https://www.ces.tech/innovation-awards/honorees/2024/best-of/h/hestia.aspx
Additional Standouts from CES 2024
inQs — SQPV Glass: Solar-generating glass that captures energy while maintaining transparency and appearance. A product that combines environmental benefit with architectural integration.
Link: https://www.ces.tech/innovation-awards/honorees/2024/best-of/s/sqpv-glass.aspx
Moss Air (Moss Lab): A moss-based air purifier and humidifier — raised $500,000+ on Kickstarter. Combines functionality with a biophilic design aesthetic that distinguishes it from standard air quality products.
Summary
CES 2025 and 2024 together show the range of what the technology industry considers innovation worth presenting on the world stage — from the practical (advertising carbon measurement, solid-state cooling chips) to the aspirational (inflatable farms, eVTOL aircraft) to the essential (leadless pacemakers, gun detection systems).
The consistent thread across both years: the boundaries between AI, sustainability, hardware design, and healthcare are dissolving. The most interesting products are the ones that don't fit neatly into existing categories.