Orange County Business Journal
Brick-and-mortar retailers are borrowing an idea from their Internet competition: in-your-face advertising.
Just as Internet shoppers are accustomed to navigating their way through banner advertisements, visitors to several local malls will soon be the target of fancy signs touting Ford, VISA, Universal Studios and other national brands.
Several local malls including the Century City Shopping Center plan to launch the program this month, changing the centers’ visual landscape by adding kiosks, large back-lit posters, high-definition plasma screens, scrolling panels and circular billboards that will display between one and three panels.
The ads will be similar to, but generally more stylish than, those that are seen in many airport terminals.
In the past, mall advertising was limited to the backsides of mall directories or to temporary barricades, but this new concept will put the messages in almost constant view of shoppers. The malls will get a cut of the ad revenue.
So far the program, which is being launched by Paris-based JCDecaux, has signed up two major mall operators: Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group and Urban Retail Properties of Chicago.
The program is slated to debut at four Southern California malls this month: Simon’s centers in Brea and Mission Viejo, and Urban Retail Properties’ centers in Santa Ana and Century City.
Other malls slated to launch the program include Valencia Town Center, Westminster Mall and Laguna Hills Mall, according to Bill Wardell, a senior vice president for JCDecaux. Wardell added that about 240 malls in 20 markets nationwide are set to participate in the program, which is called JCDecaux MallScape 2000.
“We’ve chosen to begin the installations in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, the media centers, because the future of the program depends on getting advertisers and ad agencies involved, and these three markets are where most of those people live,” Wardell said.
Under the plan, a 1 million-square-foot center would have an average of 65 structures providing 120 to 150 advertising faces. About 70 percent of the faces will be inside the malls, with the other 30 percent in parking lots and on sidewalks.
The ad revenue generated by the program is split 60-40 between JCDecaux and the mall owners. An advertiser under the plan might pay $500 to post an ad for two weeks on a 47-inch by 69-inch panel. For a fully leased 1 million-square-foot mall, the program would generate monthly revenues of between $60,000 and $75,000, with mall operators collecting about $24,000 to $30,000 of that.
Advertisers include Banana Republic, Ford Motor Co., Universal Studios Inc., Paramount Pictures and VISA International.
