1432: They Don’t Look Like That Any More

Hello.

Video games today look like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or, indeed, many other things besides.

So why, then, any time some switched-on young advertising executive wants to, for some inexplicable reason, make use of the idea of “video games” to advertise something completely different — like, say, shoes — it ends up looking like this?

I have… quite a few issues with this campaign. First of all, why the hell does it even exist? It sort of looks cool, I guess, but it has nothing to do with Schuh’s stock in trade which is, unsurprisingly, shoes. I get the impression that someone just thought “hey! Video games are cool and popular! Let’s do something with them to advertise our product!”

Actually, having inadvertently stumbled across the agency that came up with this bizarre marketing effort, it seems that, unless “Isobel” isn’t telling us something, that pretty much is all there was to it.

“Schuh’s ‘Start Xmas’ Christmas campaign was inspired by the retro theme of 1st Generation arcade games,” Isobel explains. “We won the creative pitch against several other agencies earlier in the year.”

Um. Well done? As I say, it looks cool but has absolutely fuck all to do with shoes. The main concept appears to be the word “start”, which is a button commonly found on video game controllers and arcade machines, and then they’ve just gone and run with it. “Start” Xmas. Geddit?

The problem is, though, that as I mentioned at the beginning, video games don’t look like that any more, with the exception of some indie games that are deliberately channelling the super-pixelated styles of yore. This style of video game is not something that is massively culturally relevant to the sort of person who would fall for a marketing campaign based around video games — namely, a young and rather stupid person. A young and rather stupid person who likes video games probably plays stuff like Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty or FIFA — no judgement on older, wiser people who also play those games, naturally — and not Space Invaders.

Ultimately the whole thing comes off as a bit desperate. It caught my eye when I walked past the store earlier today, but it certainly didn’t make me want to buy shoes. It did, however, make me want to write this blog post, so well done for that. It also made me feel that the people from “Planarama” behind the campaign haven’t actually played a video game ever. Can you name any games that actually say “game on” when you start them — even games from the ’80s? I can’t.

I guess it’s sort of cool that video games have reached a sufficient degree of cultural penetration for a mainstream shop like Schuh to attempt to use them to peddle their wares, but it’s also indicative of the fact that the average person in the street likely has very little clue that video games have advanced significantly in the last 30 years — to such a degree that they’d be all but unrecognisable to someone from the ’80s.

Still, I guess the super-pixelated art style is a convenient shorthand for “video games” but that doesn’t really address the core problem I have with this campaign: it’s for a shoe shop’s Christmas sale. No amount of pixelated Christmas puddings or aliens in Santa hats will hide the fact that it’s a campaign completely irrelevant to the product it’s trying to sell, and just, in fact, looks rather foolish.

On the other hand, it compelled me to talk about it and mention Schuh several times, so perhaps it is doing its job after all.