When Matt Halfill was a kid, his parents sent him to a charter school in Fresno, Calif., where he got a tremendously valuable education -- about footwear. "That wasn't the most advantaged side of town, but still people had great sneakers," Hatfill says. "My parents never got sneakers that cost more than $40, but I saw shoes that were $150 and they were beautiful."

A few years later, when Halfhill was 15, his parents moved to the island of Grenada to teach at a medical school. The Caribbean kids were even crazier about their kicks than the ones in Fresno had been. "They had catalogs and would plan all day long about what shoes they would buy if they went to Miami one day that year," Halfhill remembers. "That's when I realized this was a worldwide thing. It wasn't just in the U.S."

In 2006, having reached the seasoned age of 25, Halfhill decided to capitalize on that worldwide thing. He started a blog called NiceKicks. Today, it brings in enough traffic and ad revenue to support both him and his family in Austin, Texas, as well as a staff of four. The blog, which runs ads from Nike as well as McDonald's and the Dish Network, is also a primary media outlet for any sneaker company looking to cultivate a cool image -- which means any sneaker company.

These days, Halfhill is not alone as an object of sneaker brands' love and affection. For the past several years, athletic-shoe marketers have been going out of their way to seek out, cater to and stir up conversation among bloggers like Halfhill who are known as "sneakerheads." They're the type of consumers who will wait in line for days for a sought-after new shoe, and though they are a tiny segment of the market, they are considered the primary vehicle for building buzz and hence get an inordinate amount of the sneaker companies' attention.
For instance, in September, the New York ad agency Mother launched its first new advertising for New Balance's Lifestyle unit since it landed the account a year before. The campaign, as is the trend these days, was heavy on social-media marketing. Inside each shoebox was a Polaroid of the shoe with a code on the back.

A microsite featured a short video for every shoe. Match your code and you could "claim" your particular shoe and get your name attached to it online.

How did NB pull this off with thousands of pairs being sold? That's just the point. The shoe in question -- called 574 Clips -- was a limited release. A mere 480 pairs left the stitching machines. But 480 is actually a large launch for a limited-edition sneaker. Nike has at times released only 100 pairs of a particular shoe.

"If you think about it, Nike could sell 500 shoes and sell them all out. But these are limited runs, and, in fact, the companies often lose money on them," says Elliott Curtis, a sneaker aficionado who teaches a class at Carnegie-Mellon University called Sneakerology 101. "It's pure marketing."

Or, Curtis might say, marketing to mavens, which is what pushing sneakers is all about these days. In the 2000 book The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell laid out a theory about how hit products or movements spread. People who know a lot of people (called connectors) cross paths with mavens. Nine years down the line, it seems that the connectors are unnecessary. Give mavens a blog and access to Facebook or Twitter, and they will rule the category.



What happens then? If the sneaker industry is any indication, mavens achieve supreme importance as their blogs become the prime media for the segment's advertising, and marketers fall over each other trying to impress a small but very influential cadre of consumers. It's a phenomenon that Simon Atkins, director of Adidas' Sports Style Division U.S., is already familiar with. "We have seen the sneaker culture increase over the past several years to the point where, today, bloggers are integral partners in helping spread the word about coming products," he says. "We're putting a lot of effort into this type of consumer, and we're spending a lot of time on them."

So, is this the future of marketing?

STOMPING ON OLD MEDIA
As recently as three years ago, the sneaker industry spent a good deal of its money on print media, supporting various magazines that catered to a young, fashion-conscious crowd. But the Great Magazine Die-Off of 2009 hit those titles especially hard. Nowadays, if you sell sneakers in the U.S., you have no choice but to form good relationships with a handful of bloggers who act as tastemakers for the category. And if you want to do that, you'll have to go through Rich Antoniello.

Antoniello is the publisher of Complex Media, which produces Complex magazine, but is also affiliated with five of the top blogs in the category -- including Halfhill's blog -- which together net 2.2 million uniques and 22 million impressions per month, according to Google Analytics.
 
A few years ago, Antoniello saw what was happening in the segment. Other print publications like Vibe, Vapors and Blender that drew significant sneaker advertising were going under, and most of the important conversations were happening on blogs. So, he went to the top blogs and offered them a deal: He'd connect them with advertising revenue if they'd join Complex's network.

Antoniello says linking with the bloggers has been a win-win. The October/November issue had almost 20 pages of ads from sneaker companies, for instance. "We haven't been hit as hard as other people because we're so strong from a digital perspective," Antoniello says.

The arrangement has also had its benefits for the shoe brands as well as the bloggers. "Two years ago [the sneaker companies] would have had to talk to 40 different people," Antoniello says, adding that such blogs wouldn't necessarily have much to offer those companies from an advertising perspective. "If you bought from one of them, they wouldn't have the reach for Adidas or whoever."

Like Antoniello, Steve Levy used to be primarily in the print business; he was the publisher of Vapors magazine. But in August, Vapors ceased print publication, and now he is working to build up a roster of sneaker blogs.

"Vapors magazine was the bloggers' magazine-but they killed it," he says. "By the time we were putting a new sneaker in the magazine, the information was irrelevant." (Vapors wasn't the only casualty of the migration toward blogs. According to Nielsen data, spending for print among the top sneaker companies fell 31.8 percent and spending for TV fell 46.5 percent.)  Levy's biggest blog is HypeBeast, which is more a lifestyle blog than a pure-play sneaker site, but it still includes a lot of items on new shoe releases.
 
In late September, for instance, the blog ran an item about the Dotty Dunk Pack, a Nike sneaker that had been released already in black. But the site had a shot of the new sneaker, set for a December release, which now came in red with speckles of blue. (Or, in sneakerhead parlance: "The shoes both feature pretty standard tonal color blocks yet are set off by a full speckle treatment given in contrast fashion to the upper and tongue panels.") HypeBeast gets about 900,000 uniques a month, which is bigger than the readership of GQ. "It's where young men get their fashion from," Levy says.
 
Levy claims he works or has worked with all the big U.S. sneaker companies, providing a mix of PR and advertising sales. Six months ago, for instance, New Balance's PR team found the bloggers' insatiable demand for new information overwhelming and hired him as a liaison to them. But Levy doesn't just feed info to the blogs; he also purchases ads on behalf of the big sneaker companies. Doing both gives him more clout than the average PR firm, which can push back from bloggers if the shoe companies they represent are "continuously hitting up the blogs for PR and not supporting them on the advertising side," Levy says.

Advertising in this case doesn't only achieve the usual goal -- to reach potential customers -- but also in a way puts the sneaker companies in the position of being patrons, in a sense, for those bloggers. After all, the posts on the blogs about new sneaker releases probably work as well as advertising, if not better. But Levy says that while a post may carry more weight than the average ad, they are also usually ephemeral. "The thing about a blog post is it lives up there for at most a day," he says. "You've got to be up there every day to make a branding impression."



RISE OF THE SNEAKERHEADS
While the movement from print to online is happening across all categories, sneakers may be a special case because its hardcore fans are really hardcore. Sneakerheads are the unabashed fanatics who can own hundreds of pairs of sneakers, drool over those limited-release Nikes and will spend thousands to buy sneakers on eBay.

According to Elliott, sneakerheads have been around in one form or another since the late 1960s, when gym-shoe companies began offering a variety of colors, some of which could only be found in certain stores. The movement picked up steam in the early to mid-'90s when Japanese sneakerheads began raiding U.S. stores to sell the same (used) sneakers back home at a significant markup. "They'd go to the basements of these stores and buy stocks of sneakers for $20 and sell them for $750," Elliott says.

Antonio Bertone, the CMO of Puma, says that scene remained underground for a long time. "This was before the Internet," he says. "It was people with sneakers in suitcases. Everyone used to make fun of the Japanese because they were selling used shoes at top dollar." About five or six years ago, the sneakerhead movement went comparatively mainstream as a bunch of small boutiques opened in New York and elsewhere offering rare sneakers. "That," Bertone explains, "ended up fueling this whole notion of limited edition."

The online representation of the sneakerhead movement lagged by a couple of years, but by 2006 or so, everyone agrees that sneaker bloggers had become a force in their own right. "What we've seen is that the sneakerhead is growing in terms of depth and weight of education," Adidas' Atkins says. They are not, in other words, just another group of bloggers posting random thoughts online, but a recognized coterie of experts whose posted word can approach dogma for the faithful.

Which probably explains why there aren't many of them-at least the ones whose word really matters. In that Mother Study, the agency found that sneakerheads are few in number but highly influential. "They're the thought leaders," Mother strategist Ben Parker says. "It's very important to listen to them carefully."

That's precisely what sneaker brands are doing. New Balance's 574 Clips launch, for instance, was less about making a profit on the shoes (which sold for $75) than creating a buzz online. Not surprisingly, the sneakerheads wound up dominating the conversation. "The store owners of Burn Rubber [a sneaker boutique in Detroit] would Twitter about that all day while the shoes are selling by the minute," says Luis Navarro, product manager for New Balance Lifestyle. "From there it would filter down until who knows how many people are following this one specific person."

But if thousands of twitterbugs are fawning over a limited-edition shoe that may not even turn a profit for the brand, so what? Where's the real marketing benefit for the company? Bradley Carbone, lifestyle editor for Complex magazine, believes that a buzz created around a limited-edition model is likely to have a halo effect on a brand's mass-market shoes, too. "If [New Balance] created hype around a silhouette," he says, "that can drive sales for a similar model that's sold widely." It's a far cry from the old days of sneaker marketing, when it was all about signing the next star athlete. Bertone says that doesn't really move the market anymore. "You'd do just as well signing a hot graffiti artist," he says.



MAVENS, LIMITED
If you're reading this and worrying if something similar can happen to your category, don't, for now at least. The influence of bloggers on the sneaker segment appears to be not only singular, but even on the wane. There are parallels in other industries, but in those cases, bloggers have more limited clout. A similar ruboff effect occurs in Hollywood, for instance, but only to a degree. Chris Thilk, who runs the blog Movie Marketing Madness, says that the movie industry is probably the first segment in which bloggers have assumed a level of importance that makes them the center of marketing efforts.

Thilk says that's been the case since about 2000 or so, when Hollywood execs began to see the power of Harry Knowles' Ain't It Cool News blog. But Thilk says at the moment, blog buzz is mainly a factor for genre and indie films. "That's where you'll see the producers bringing in the bloggers for set visits," he says. But negative buzz won't necessarily equal death at the box office. After all, Transformers earned more than $400 million despite toxic word of mouth. Nevertheless, as sneaker companies seek to secure their cool credibility, they'll need the OK of the fanboys.

Which means feeding them. Atkins confirms that Adidas sends its limited-edition sneaks ("samples," he calls them) to a chosen group of influential sneakerheads, along with plenty of information designed to "educate the blogger," as he puts it. "We provide them with enough information that they can feel confident to [voice] their opinion on it." The chosen sneakerheads, he says, distinguish themselves as "the ones who are absolutely fascinated with our products."

Absolutely fascinated-by running shoes? The unbiased observer has to wonder what terrestrial force drives such people. Though for some sneakerheads, the blogs are a money-making scheme; for most, the operating force is the same one that drives Deadheads, Harley drivers and technogeeks who'll roll out a sleeping bag on the sidewalk to be the first to buy the latest version of the iPhone.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that sneakerheads are usually guys. Being on the nerdy side also helps, and the Mother Study, for one, noted a strong correlation between sneaker collecting and being a fan of Dungeons & Dragons.

"It's a bit antisocial," Bertone says of the fans that pine for the latest shoe, only to shove it into a closet and never even put it on. "I personally would like to see more people wearing the shoes."

In fact, some, including Antoniello, believe that the influence of sneaker bloggers may have already peaked. "I want to see if this trend will dissipate into core tiers of bloggers," he says. "Those that are left will be elevated to evening newscasters."

Rich Prenderville, Reebok's vp of global brand marketing, says while sneakerheads are important, "I don't think they influence the rest of the market as much as we thought a few years ago." He adds, "It's almost like they're two separate markets."

Not everyone agrees. For Atkins, the age of the sneakerhead has only begun. "There's a real sense that this type of consumer will continue to grow in the next two, five, 10 years," he says. "There's no indication that it's going away."