Neither did I.
Fashion Week, as large as it is and as important as it tends to be for brands, really doesn’t resonate outside of certain circles. While I tout the niche areas for marketing, New Balance is in an interesting position. They aren’t really a go to for style although they do have some of the dopest shoes. The brand has been on my radar as ‘one to watch’ in 2018, but many of their collabs and releases have been so under the radar that the success of the drops hasn’t contributed to improving the brand cache with potential customers. They recently did a successful launch of a new project, but in typical fashion for every brand out there not named Nike, they killed their own SEO by completely removing the page for the Test Run Project:
New Balance Enters Chunky Outsole Market With the PRJ 1.0 a Performance Model
In the article above I was pleasantly surprised by the sell through of what was a quickstrike styled release from NB. Today after discovering that the brand utilized Artificial Intelligence for “Real Time Exception Spotting” during New York’s Fashion Week as a form of building brand awareness, I decided to revisit the article above only to find that the entire Test Run project page had been removed from their site.
I took a moment to search for this NYFW concept and found one video from Mashable on the project. Take a moment to view the video above to understand what New Balance was attempting to do with AI.
(If you just watched that my entire reason for skipping to these words in parenthesis was to create a WTF moment. This was wack.)
First, the Test Run concept was dope, but that’s not important. What’s important is SEO, 404s and error pages. Google dominates search. When a website is set up correctly the pages are indexed and searchable. This creates a solid set of coding to be scraped by Google when listing sites in search. When a company removes a page without forwarding it to another page it ranks the website lower. The Test Run page is no longer on the New Balance site.
Second, the use of AI is always exciting, but giving away a pair of Fresh Foams (a shoe on the low end for New Balance and not very exciting) is akin to telling a fan they won a thousand dollars… in pesos (51 bucks). The camera rating people is somewhat corny, and it’s creepy. I get the idea of utilizing tech to acquire measurements for data purposes, and the recording was being displayed so there wasn’t really an invasion of privacy, but still it’s not exactly cool although during Fashion Week people expect to be filmed.
The idea of AI is great, but this was not one of NB’s better moments.
Read more about the project here.
