Skechers Earned Some Street Cred With Nike Diss

While it’s equivalent to a G-League team firing shots at the Warriors, Skechers’ recent newspaper diss towards Nike is amusing.

By now, everyone has seen Zion Williamson‘s blown-out-shoe incident; it was the top story on pretty much any sports program in the days following and resulted in an article on all the top sports blogs (including ours). Opinions were coming from all over the place and it opened the door for shots from other shoe companies — not necessarily rivals, but brands fighting for the same customer.

Puma fired off a tweet right after, saying it “wouldn’t have happened in pumas,” and on Sunday, another shoe brand let a shot fly in Nike’s direction, except they did it the old school way — through the newspaper.

Skechers dialed up gigantic ads in the best newspapers our country has to offer, mimicking Nike’s famous “Just Do It” tagline by putting “Just Blew It” on top of a busted sneaker — in classic Nike block font, of course. On the bottom, you finally see the Skechers logo, with “We won’t split on you” right beneath it.

https://twitter.com/CaseyP_Sports/status/1102381312437039104

I saw the ad personally in The Washington Post but it was also in the New York Times, per a tweet from NYT design editor Josh Crutchmer. Highsnobiety also wrote that the Tony Romo-sponsored brand “placed the ad in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.”

While the brash ad makes Skechers a little bit cooler than I previously thought, it reminds me of the Soulja Boy/DeShawn Stevenson-vs.-LeBron James/Jay-Z beef from 2008. Nike was probably like, “wait, who placed the ad?” before brushing it off a few minutes later. The big guys won’t respond, that’s for sure, but if they did they’d get Ja Rule’d at the hands of Nike. In the meantime, they’ll get some good press and a few street cred points from around the way.