Cherry
Picks

The hottest
The coolest
The newest

Just for
“A List”
major
media

Just for
the products
we pick
 

A quick history of Cherry Picks

The first Cherry Picks was triggered by some broadcast press pals of Marty Winston, the guy behind Newstips. Marty has a longstanding reputation for doing months of homework on major trade shows, knowing ahead of time what’s going to be there that’s new and cool. His pals wanted him to get permission from CES to do a walking tour on the day before the show opened, hitting the high spots. We set a rendezvous point, hired a video crew, invited the vendors behind the best stuff we could find to be there and invited our press pals. The turnout was nothing short of amazing, with more than 50 of the top press organizations showing up. CBS and NBC both requested satellite feeds of our video. It started fine and everything went well for a while, but once we got deeper into the exhibit floor, negotiating around the booths under construction became a major challenge and about two hours in, the contingent dwindled. Nobody thought it anything less than a success, except maybe Marty.

CES took note of the crowd we assembled that first year, and the following year provided us with a meeting room space. They changed its location at the last minute, which lost us several participants, the room was too small for the event and the previous conference was slow in getting out of there. Everyone (except maybe Marty) was forgiving and it was a great event. We changed the nature of the event with this move indoors. We extended our outreach to try to include every exhibitor and, for that matter, a good number of retail consumer products from companies not exhibiting. It was that year that established our essential guideline for judging: We will pick no more than 100 of what we consider to be the hottest, coolest new products; each one gets a 45-second show & tell slot in front of a room full of top-tier press, then press & product mingle time after.

We’ve been working to improve the event since. We’ve been holding it in a pair of ballrooms at The Wynn, one for the showroom and one for the Green Room. We expanded the camera platform, the AV distribution, our own video crew and amenities on both sides. We added HD video. It’s not perfect yet; for example, we still don’t have good photo documentation of the event (Marty says, this year for sure).

Financially, the event has been a money pit, with Newstips losing as much as $80,000 producing the event. In 2008, we tried imposing submission and acceptance fees, doing research among PR operations to determine the appropriate value point for them; while these fees may have stopped some entries, the greater detriment to the 2008 event was a dearth of innovation overall. We had a record low number of winners; that would have been true even if there had been no fee and no submission process. We’re now seeing a much broader swath of really sweet new gear, which portends a very exciting selection of winners that will get the juices flowing for our press audience and others.

And with luck, we’ll find a way to lose not quite so much money doing it.