More from Rico's childhood

The New York Times has an article by Andrew Adam Newman about Keds:

When marketing retro sneakers, marketers face a challenge: how do you sell them to consumers too young to be nostalgic for bygone eras? Keds, a 94-year-old brand owned by Collective Brands, thinks it has the answer with a new slogan, “the original sneaker,” and a website that had its debut on 9 March. Created by the Night Agency, a digital marketing firm in Manhattan, TheOriginalSneaker.com features an opening page laid out like a monthly calendar that changes daily and features tidbits about the brand and cultural highlights from the last nine decades. On Saturday, for example, clicking a photo of Albert Einstein at a blackboard revealed the statement that on that date in 1916, the scientist published his theory of relativity. Clicking other images revealed memorable video from the 1980s: clips from the film The Breakfast Club and Jane Fonda’s Workout. Other boxes featured shoes (and links for buying them online), as well as old advertisements for Keds.
Kristin Kohler Burrows, the president of Keds, said, “Our target consumers in attitude and personality are 24-year-old millennials who are attracted to creativity, a belief that they can make a difference in the world, openness, and multiculturalism.” Because those consumers have been tying their own laces for only two decades, the brand aimed to share its history without seeming like a lecture. “We have deep roots and history, and the challenge is to make that relevant to consumers today rather than just be a retro brand,” Ms. Burrows said. “We had to tell the story on a platform that’s very today and very relevant and very engaged, and in a way that also highlights more modern times.”
Keds is not using the slogan “the original sneaker” qualitatively, as Dr Pepper once did in a campaign that suggested that choosing the soft drink made you “part of an original crowd”, but rather staking a historical claim. “First manufactured by the U.S. Rubber Company (know as Uniroyal), Keds are the first shoes to be called sneakers,” the new website originally stated. “The term, coined in 1917 by Henry Nelson McKinney, an agent for the advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son, refers to their soft noiseless rubber soles, which allow the wearer to ‘sneak’ up on unsuspecting friends or family.” But that claim of coining the term sneaker ends up lacking something that is usually a given with those rubber soles: traction.
Grant Barrett, a lexicographer who is co-host of the syndicated public radio show A Way With Words, found evidence to the contrary. Mr. Barrett pointed to an article in The New York Times in 1887 , which, quoting an article in The Boston Journal of Education, said, “It is only the harassed schoolmaster who can fully appreciate the pertinency of the name boys give to tennis shoes— sneakers.” He also pointed to an entry about “sneaker” on the website FirstMention.com, which features what purports to be an 1889 advertisement from Jordan Marsh, the former department store chain based in Boston, which was selling “500 pairs of men’s tennis oxfords (sneakers)” for 59 cents a pair.
Presented with these earlier citations, a representative for Keds said that the brand was the first to advertise using the term “sneakers” prominently, but then, although the company has a library of archival advertising and features dozens of ads on its site, could find only two passing mentions of the word in advertising for the first half of the last century, in 1922 and 1934.
Mr. McKinney, the advertising agent Keds claims coined the term, died in 1918, according to an obituary in The New York Times, while his agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, founded in Philadelphia in 1869 and responsible for such slogans as “Reach out and touch someone” and “Be all you can be,” closed in 2000.
On 19 March, Keds revised the description on their site to acknowledge the earlier use of the term by Boston students, while still including the anecdote about Mr. McKinney and saying that Keds “took the term ‘sneaker’ to broader heights and established a new footwear category”. That same day, on its official Facebook page, Keds revised a claim that said that in 1916, it “made the first shoe with a soft rubber sole and coined the term ‘sneaker,’” to say instead that “in 1916, Keds created an American Classic”. (Converse began making rubber-soled shoes before Keds, in 1908, according to the Converse website; in England, canvas footwear with rubber soles dates back to the 1830s.)
Keds’s primary site, Keds.com, however, had not dialed down claims as of Sunday, saying, “In 1916 we started a footwear revolution when we created the first sneaker,” and, elsewhere on that site, that it had made “the first shoe with a soft rubber sole and coined the term ‘sneaker’.”
Marshal Cohen, who follows the footwear industry as chief industry analyst of the NPD Group, a research firm, said the internet has made it more important than ever for marketing claims to be watertight. “There is a significant segment of the population today that will go out and challenge any statement,” Mr. Cohen said. “With the reach of social media, the minute an ad campaign is challenged or can’t be substantiated, social media is going to spread that like wildfire. Before you make a statement, you have to be sure you can justify it and live up to it.”