Scarborough Measures Mall as Medium

A new measurement of consumers' weekly visits to malls from Scarborough Research promises greater accuracy in reach and frequency metrics for this heavily trafficked place-based medium, according to Stewart Stockdale, CMO of Simon Properties, a major mall developer which partnered with Scarborough to implement the new rating. Stockdale hopes the new, more precise Scarborough measurement will make mall advertising a more attractive prospect for media buyers.

Beginning in 2004, Scarborough has asked respondents to its mail-in questionnaire about their visits to malls in the last week. Previously, Scarborough only asked about mall visits in the 30- and 90-day periods preceding the questionnaire, and media buyers found this too sketchy in light of consumers' notoriously unreliable memories. Stockdale added: "We also had this fairly antiquated measurement by people-counters in our properties," concluding, that "we really needed to get industry accredited reach and frequency metrics."

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Stockdale said Simon is building a "comprehensive strategy for our mall properties that includes indoor media and outdoor media, digital media and static media." As part of this, Simon recently announced a joint venture with Publicis for indoor digital media. Overall "audience" numbers are certainly impressive; Stockdale boasted that "we get about 2.4 billion visits a year to our properties," adding: "That's more traffic than all professional sports and college sports combined, times four. And remember--these are people on the point of purchase."

Nonetheless, Stockdale recalled, "we still needed to get Scarborough to establish a metric so the media buying community can understand it on their own terms." Here, according to Alisa Joseph, vice president of marketing and advertising for Scarborough and Arbitron, "we're using the same modeling techniques that are used in measurement of traditional media for reach and frequency." Joseph explained: "With 30-day shopping and 90-day shopping questions, the 7-day question allows us to create a curve" describing consumer mall habits with more confidence.

Joseph added: "We've also created a new module of our proprietary software that allows media planners to do reach and frequency calculations in their own systems" using Scarborough's data. Overall, Joseph agreed with Stockdale that mall owners are hungry for ad dollars: "They're looking for a bigger piece of the media pie. They want to be considered, like all out-of-home, as a natural part of the agency buy."

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