Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES
CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gizmodo walked into CES 2008 already primed against the show — one day earlier the site ran a [[a:1182576|column denouncing CES as a bloated trade show embodying everything wrong with the tech industry]]. Armed with TV-B-Gone clickers supplied by MAKE, the editors escalated from one display to a wall of them, turning a consumer device meant for killing unwanted TVs in bars into a weapon against exhibitors' paid booth time.
The story spread across the blogosphere within a day, and the reaction came largely from inside gadget-blogging itself: Global Neighbourhoods reported the victims may have been bloggers, Webware framed it under 'Bloggers Behaving Badly,' and Gear Diary called the stunt 'total and utter crap' directed at Motorola and fellow bloggers — meaning Gizmodo's collateral damage landed on the very peer community covering the show alongside it.
First-order effects
- Exhibitors like Motorola, whose presentations were cut mid-demo by the clickers, lost control of their paid booth moments, and the bloggers in those sessions — Gear Diary among them — publicly broke ranks to condemn a fellow outlet.
- Gizmodo's standing with CEA, the show's organizer and gatekeeper of press credentials, is now the immediate open question, since the prank targeted the show floor itself.
Second-order effects
- Rival gadget blogs gain a differentiation opportunity by positioning as professionals while Gizmodo absorbs the 'bloggers behaving badly' label, sharpening the credibility split between hobbyist stunts and trade-press conduct.
- MAKE gets a windfall of attention for TV-B-Gone from exactly the audience least likely to have known the product, showing how a prank converts someone else's trade-show investment into another company's marketing.
Third-order effects
- If stunts like this recur, trade-show organizers face pressure to tighten press-access vetting and on-floor enforcement, raising the cost of entry for independent bloggers relative to credentialed legacy press.
- The episode hardens an identity test for gadget blogs: whether traffic earned through disruption is worth the editorial credibility traded away, a line the community itself is now policing in public.
The trend: Gadget blogs are trading editorial credibility for attention at major trade shows, forcing both organizers and the blog community itself to define what separates press conduct from provocation.