Beyoncè Knowles, who has agreed to be Vizio’s spokesperson, won six Grammy awards last Sunday. Sony’s Taylor Swift won only four (although Album of the Year was one of them). Does any of this matter to readers of Display Daily? Well, maybe, sort of.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

At CES Vizio announced it had entered into a three-year North American endorsement agreement with Beyoncè. The agreement grants name and likeness rights to Vizio for North American advertising, product packaging, web, promotions, public relations and point of sale materials. So we can look forward to seeing Beyoncè’s comely visage looking out at us from those stacks of Vizio cartons at Costco.

But that’s not all. A Vizio press release says, "The partnership will also allow Knowles to participate in the design and performance characteristics of new products from VIZIO’s ever-expanding line of audio, visual and web-enabled products." And we thought engineers were responsible for performance characteristics. How foolish of us.

Now that Vizio has bragging rights to being "America’s #1 LCD HDTV Company," company executives clearly feel they need a spokesperson of comparable stature. But doesn’t this mark a significant change from the original low-overhead, put-all-the-money-into-the-set approach that made Vizio successful to begin with? Will Vizio no longer be the lean and scrappy underdog? And if that’s true, does that leave room for an AOC, Westinghouse, Hanspree or others to out-Vizio Vizio?

At Sony’s CES press conference, company CEO Sir Howard Stringer’s first two announcements were 1) a music licensing deal, and 2) that Taylor Swift would be Sony’s spokesperson. Swift joined Sir Howard on stage and said, "I feel like my fans are all very cutting edge, so when it comes to technology I’m very interested in what’s the newest and best." At least she’s not designing the TV sets. She did sing, which was better than her promise to use Sony equipment to document her forthcoming tour.

It’s significant that Stringer’s first two announcements had nothing to do with hardware. Prior to becoming CEO at Sony, Sir Howard had a long career in TV broadcasting. That’s what he knows. He voiced a strategy of using Sony media to stimulate Sony TV sales, as if Sony’s entertainment divisions would only make their media available for Sony’s third-place-selling (more or less) TV sets. The new-product announcements were generally a day late and a dollar short. For all of Stringer’s emphasis on 3D, Toshiba, Samsung, and Panasonic will be in the market first. Sharp announced Quad Pixel. Toshiba announced Cell TV. Sony had nothing comparable on the TV side, and its small-product announcements were uninspiring.

In the end, Vizio can afford Beyoncè. Sony needs to pay more attention to its engineers.