Lady Gaga, Polaroid, and the CES Livestream We Put Everywhere

How we used Ustream, embedded video, digital advertising, media outreach and synchronized social promotion to turn a packed CES product unveiling into a worldwide live event.

In January 2011, Lady Gaga walked into a packed Polaroid booth at CES in Las Vegas to unveil three products she had helped create as the company’s creative director.

I was not standing inside the booth.

I was at home, working online to make sure the audience extended far beyond the people who could physically crowd around her.

We livestreamed the presentation through Ustream. We arranged homepage exposure, syndicated the embedded player through blogs, put the video stream inside digital advertising units, pitched the media and coordinated social posts to hit as the presentation was happening.

Lady Gaga had the attention of the room.

My job was to help give that room internet-sized walls.

How Polaroid Became My Client

At the time, William Morris Endeavor had Evan White PR, Inc. on retainer.

I worked across several WME-connected celebrities, brands and consumer projects. My contact there was Johnny Sabbath, who helped coordinate the agency side and facilitated the access and relationships required to make these programs happen.

One of those projects was Polaroid.

Polaroid was an iconic brand working to reinvent itself for a digital future. The company that had made instant photography feel magical was searching for a way to become culturally relevant again in a world increasingly dominated by digital cameras, smartphones and online sharing.

Through WME, Polaroid entered into a multiyear partnership with Lady Gaga. In January 2010, the company named her creative director for a specialty line of imaging products.

That initial announcement generated enormous attention.

But the more interesting question was what would happen next.

A year later, Polaroid and Gaga were ready to unveil the products created through the partnership.

The Grey Label Products

On January 6, 2011, Lady Gaga appeared at the Polaroid booth at CES to introduce the first three products in the new Grey Label collection:

• The GL10 Instant Mobile Printer, a portable device that could print photos from a mobile phone

• The GL30 Instant Digital Camera, which combined a digital camera with Polaroid-style instant printing

• The GL20 Camera Glasses, sunglasses with a built-in camera and displays capable of showing images across the lenses

The glasses received much of the attention because they looked like a piece of Lady Gaga’s stage wardrobe had been turned into consumer technology.

You can still watch the surviving CNET video of Lady Gaga’s Grey Label presentation or this shorter Mashable report showing the camera, printer and camera glasses.

The products were strange, futuristic and intensely visual. They were exactly the kind of objects that could dominate a technology show for an afternoon.

But first, people needed to see them.

A Packed CES Booth Was Not a Big Enough Audience

My suggestion was straightforward: livestream the unveiling.

Ustream was also my client. I had already helped the platform turn livestreams such as the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam into international media stories.

At the time, livestreaming was not an automatic component of every product launch. There was no Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live or TikTok Live. Most people could not simply pull out a phone, press a button and broadcast high-quality video to a global audience.

A major livestream required access, production planning, technical coordination, distribution and promotion.

Johnny Sabbath facilitated the WME side. I worked to make sure Ustream had the access and coverage it needed and that Polaroid’s physical CES unveiling could become a much larger online event.

From home, I watched the same stream we were sending out to the world. While the Polaroid team and production crew managed the physical event in Las Vegas, I focused on the digital audience surrounding it.

The packed booth demonstrated the demand.

The livestream allowed us to escape the physical limits of the room.

We Did Not Put the Stream in One Place

The most important part of the strategy was not simply broadcasting the unveiling on Ustream.

We distributed the broadcast.

Ustream gave the event prominent homepage exposure. We made sure the stream was properly covered and accessible through the platform. But we did not expect every Lady Gaga fan, technology reporter or curious consumer to independently navigate to one destination.

We brought the livestream to them.

The Ustream player could be embedded into other websites. We syndicated the broadcast through blog posts and media placements so people could watch without leaving the pages they were already visiting.

We also developed advertising units containing the live video player itself.

Instead of seeing a static Polaroid advertisement and being asked to click somewhere else, viewers could encounter Lady Gaga unveiling the products live within the ad unit.

That was a remarkable idea in 2011.

A physical product launch in Las Vegas had become portable internet media.

Everything Had to Hit at Once

Live media presents a specific challenge: the audience has to know about it before or while it is happening.

A perfectly produced livestream with no coordinated distribution can still play to an empty room.

We approached the Grey Label unveiling as a synchronized media event.

We pitched journalists. We arranged online placements. We coordinated blog embeds, homepage promotion and social media posts. We worked to make sure that as Lady Gaga stepped into the Polaroid booth, links and messages were traveling across the internet at the same time.

The goal was concentrated attention.

Not a blog post the following week.

Not a recap published after everyone had left Las Vegas.

We wanted hundreds of thousands of people to encounter the launch while it was unfolding.

My recollection is that the distributed broadcast accumulated approximately one million viewers across its live and syndicated placements. I have not found a surviving Ustream analytics report that independently verifies the final number, so I treat that figure as a recollection rather than an audited total.

What can still be documented is how widely the moment traveled.

Lady Gaga Owned the First Day of CES

The presentation generated coverage far beyond the technology trades.

Billboard called Lady Gaga the star of the first official day of CES.

The Hollywood Reporter covered Gaga unveiling the Polaroid line, while Rolling Stone focused on the futuristic camera sunglasses.

Engadget covered all three Grey Label products, including the portable printer, instant digital camera and camera glasses.

The Las Vegas Sun documented the crowd packed around Gaga as she demonstrated the GL20 glasses. Approximately 140,000 people attended CES that year, but only a small fraction of them could physically fit around one booth.

The livestream allowed the launch to reach beyond CES attendees, beyond Las Vegas and beyond the technology industry.

That was the point.

Watching the Moment Travel From Home

My experience of the launch was very different from that of the people packed around Gaga.

I was at home, working online.

I watched the presentation through the digital infrastructure we had helped assemble. I tracked the stream, worked on placements, supported the media outreach and helped coordinate the wave of posts and links introducing the event to viewers.

That distance was part of what made the moment so interesting.

Lady Gaga was physically standing in one booth in one convention center in Las Vegas. But the event was simultaneously appearing on home computers, media websites, blogs, social feeds and digital advertising placements.

The internet made the physical location almost secondary.

A viewer did not need a CES credential. They did not need a plane ticket to Las Vegas. They did not need to fight through the crowd around the Polaroid booth.

They only needed to encounter one of the places where we had put the player.

I was working from home, but I was also helping to expand the room.

Polaroid Was Selling More Than Three Products

The launch was about the GL10, GL20 and GL30, but the larger story was Polaroid itself.

Polaroid had once represented the magic of seeing a photograph immediately. Digital cameras and smartphones had changed the meaning of “instant,” and the company needed a new story.

Lady Gaga brought fashion, music, performance art, technology and enormous cultural influence into the brand.

The Grey Label products attempted to connect Polaroid’s history of instant photography with a new world of digital creation and sharing. The camera glasses were not simply another pair of sunglasses. They represented Gaga’s vision of photography, fashion and performance coming together.

Whether every product ultimately became a commercial success was almost secondary to the immediate communications objective.

For that day, Polaroid was at the center of the cultural conversation again.

What the Livestream Added

A celebrity appearance can generate attention. A press release can explain a new product. A trade-show booth can create an impressive physical scene.

The livestream connected all three.

It gave journalists and bloggers something immediate to share. It gave fans access to an event they could never attend. It gave the social campaign a destination. It transformed the CES booth from a physical location into a broadcast studio.

Most importantly, the stream created urgency.

People were not merely reading that Lady Gaga had unveiled camera glasses. They were watching her hold them, explain them and show them to the world.

Live video made the announcement feel like an event instead of an update.

Distribution Was Part of the Creative Idea

One of the lessons I carried forward from this project is that distribution cannot be an afterthought.

Producing the event was only part of the work.

The complete idea included:

• The CES booth and physical presentation

• Lady Gaga’s live appearance

• Ustream production and homepage promotion

• An embeddable video player

• Syndication through blogs and media sites

• Live video inside digital advertising units

• Coordinated public relations outreach

• Social posts released around the same moment

• Recorded video that could continue circulating after the event

Those pieces amplified one another.

Media coverage directed attention toward the event. Social posts created urgency. The embeds reduced the friction required to watch. The livestream produced footage that remained useful after the presentation ended.

Today, we might call that an integrated content ecosystem.

At the time, we were trying to make one enormous CES moment impossible to miss.

From Polaroid to the Work I Do Today

My work with Polaroid eventually ended, but my relationship with William Morris Endeavor continued across other brands and consumer projects, including work connected with Revlon, Starbucks and additional WME clients.

The Polaroid launch remained one of the clearest demonstrations of what interested me about public relations then and still interests me now.

The best PR does not begin with a press release.

It begins with a moment worth covering.

Then it builds the distribution system around that moment.

You bring together the right personalities, products, platforms and media. You create a physical experience. You make it available online. You give journalists a story, audiences something worth watching and the internet something it can carry farther than the original room ever could.

Lady Gaga brought the crowd to the Polaroid booth.

Our job was to make the booth as large as the internet.

Explore more of my work or contact Evan White PR to create a launch designed to travel.