New Balance is deploying artificial intelligence to track the outfits of New York Fashion Week attendees and reward those with the best style-sense with free sneakers.
Working with marketing agency VML, New Balance will set up a booth in the Soho neighborhood with cameras facing out in every direction, in order to scan as many people as possible walking the streets. Outfits will be tracked in real-time, analyzing colors, patterns, shapes, styles and other features using AI to identify the “anomalies and exceptions to the norm.”
New Balance representatives will then approach passersby who are identified as truly stylish and reward them with a pair of the brand’s Fresh Foam Cruz Nubuck sneakers.
The effort is part of a marketing campaign called “Be The Exception,” according to a report on Fast Company, and people it identifies as looking different will be offered a free pair of its $89.95 Fresh Foam Cruz Nubuck sneakers on September 6, the start of New York fashion week.
“The idea is to celebrate people who go left when everybody else is going right,” said Allie Tsavdarides, director of global marketing at New Balance, of the “Be the Exception” campaign. “During a week where there is incredible emphasis and excitement around new trends and fashion, New Balance wants to celebrate individuals who are expressing themselves in independent and distinctive ways.”
The experience, called “Real Time Exception Spotting,” will be powered by TensorFlow, which will gather information about what people are wearing, in most part devoid of human intervention or bias. In the run-up to fashion week, a team of computer scientists has been going around the city collecting baseline data about fashion trends in order to feed the system.
According to Footwear News, the brand plans to use the technology again in Toronto, Stockholm and Madrid over the upcoming months.
