Mall giant Simon launches its own retail media network built on foot-traffic data

Simon Property Group, the world’s largest operator of shopping malls and outlet centers, has launched Simon Media Network, a retail media offering that packages the landlord’s visitor data for advertisers. The network was announced on August 27 and is led by Jared Blechman, a former NBA business-development executive who joined Simon as chief revenue officer earlier this year.

The audience layer is assembled from three sources: the Simon+ loyalty program, opted-in location signals from Wi-Fi sign-ons at Simon’s properties, and licensed third-party purchase data. Campaigns can be run as a managed service or self-served through the DSPs and SSPs that agencies already use, and can be scoped nationally, regionally, by market or down to a single property.

On the activation side, Simon controls nearly 4,000 digital screens across more than 200 destinations that together log more than 2 billion visits a year, according to Digiday. The same audiences can be pushed off-property into connected TV, social and other digital channels, with results read against a control group to estimate incremental visits or transactions.

Why it matters

Retail media has so far been the province of retailers with transaction data: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Tesco. Simon’s pitch is different. As a landlord it sees behavior across hundreds of tenants, restaurants and entertainment venues rather than a single till, which Blechman argues makes the audiences “much broader” than a conventional retail media network. The company, which reported $6.4 billion in consolidated revenue last year, has been explicit that it wants growth outside its core leasing business.

The timing tracks a broader shift from retail media to what the industry now calls commerce media, where any business with a physical footprint and first-party data tries to monetize it. Eric Lamb of DOOH ad-tech firm Vistar Media told Digiday he expects hotel chains, gyms and coffee shops to follow the same path. Simon is also courting non-endemic categories such as travel, food and finance, not just the brands sold inside its malls.

What’s next

The test for Simon will be proof. Blechman has framed the whole proposition around showing that a campaign moved someone to visit a store, and marketers burned by retail media’s measurement fog will want to see that closed loop work at scale before shifting budgets. For European mall operators, including the owners of Poland’s largest galerie handlowe, Simon offers a template: screens plus loyalty plus Wi-Fi is a stack most of them already own.