Mall owner Simon starts selling ads using visitor data

Simon Property Group runs more shopping malls and outlet centres than any other company in the world. It has now started selling advertising. The new business is called Simon Media Network. It packages what Simon knows about its visitors and sells that to advertisers. This kind of business is called retail media, meaning ads sold by a shop, or here by the owner of the shopping centre. Simon announced it on 27 August. Jared Blechman leads it. He used to work in business development at the NBA and joined Simon as chief revenue officer earlier this year.

The audience data comes from three places. The first is Simon+, the loyalty scheme. The second is location signals from people who sign in to Wi-Fi at Simon’s centres, and only from people who agreed to it. The third is purchase data that Simon pays other companies for. Advertisers can hand the work to Simon’s team, or buy the ads themselves through the same tools agencies already use. They can buy across the whole country, a region, one town, or a single centre.

Simon controls almost 4,000 digital screens in more than 200 places. Together those places record more than two billion visits a year, according to Digiday. The same audiences can also be reached outside the centres, on internet-connected TVs, on social media and elsewhere online. Results are compared with a control group, a similar group of people who did not see the ad. That helps show how many extra visits or purchases the ads brought.

Retail media has belonged to Amazon, Walmart, Target and Tesco

Until now retail media has mostly belonged to shops with their own sales records, such as Amazon, Walmart, Target and Tesco. Simon offers something different. As a landlord it can see how people behave across hundreds of shops, restaurants and entertainment venues, not at one till. Blechman says that makes the audiences “much broader” than a normal retail media network. Simon reported 6.4 billion dollars in revenue last year, and it has said openly that it wants to grow outside renting space.

The launch fits a wider change. The industry now talks about commerce media, where any business with physical premises and its own customer data tries to make money from it. Eric Lamb works at Vistar Media, a company that sells technology for outdoor digital screens. He told Digiday he expects hotel chains, gyms and coffee shops to do the same. Simon is also approaching advertisers from outside its centres, such as travel, food and finance brands.

Simon must prove an ad made someone visit a shop

Simon will have to prove its case. Blechman has built the whole offer around showing that an ad made someone visit a shop. Many marketers have been let down by unclear measurement in retail media before. They will probably want to see the proof work at scale before they move budgets. For mall owners in Europe, including the owners of Poland’s biggest shopping centres, Simon offers a model to copy. Screens, a loyalty scheme and Wi-Fi are things most of them already have.