With November just days off, the holiday shopping season now looms, and even in this sour economy Americans will be out. And if they're not buying as much as last year, they'll at least be looking in store windows.
That makes it the ideal season for some of the most innovative alternative media: Campaigns in the front windows of stores that are vacant, whether on New York's Fifth Avenue or Main Street USA or at the local mall.
Back when everyone shopped downtown, before the rise of the malls, the front window was the stage upon which merchants paraded their latest styles, typically draped on mannequins, and that's still so in the windows of traditional merchants.
But these days, with so many stores empty, that storefront window is just as likely to be a stage filled with digital, interactive elements, and often as not the sponsor is a major consumer goods marketer hawking anything from cars to electronic products to sexy undergarments.
Sometimes the storefront becomes in fact a real stage on which live actors give performances aimed at capturing the imaginations of passersby.
To find out how to get your client’s message in storefronts, read on.
This is one in a Media Life series on buying the new out-of-home venues. They appear weekly.
Fast Facts
What
Ad campaigns staged in the windows of vacant retail stores.
Who
Many companies offer services in which they contract with owners of vacant retail space to place advertising in the windows of stores. For this article Media Life looked at Inwindow Outdoor in New York, WindowGain in Newton, Mass., and Neverstop in Seattle.
How it works
In a nation with more retail space than retailers to fill them, there are vacant stores in virtually every city's business district, as well as at malls in the suburbs. And more and more the front windows of these vacant premises are being used as staging areas by all manner of marketers.
They are attractive ad venues for the same reason that storefronts have long been attractive to retailers: They capture the attention of people walking by.
And while the person can't walk into the store and buy the product, the point of purchase these days isn't that far away: typically the nearest internet connection, and that may be a cell phone in the shopper's purse.
As with so much in alternative media, staging is critical, with the aim of getting that shopper to look, then look again. So a lot of the campaigns resort to eye-arresting displays, some of them quite huge, many of them digital.
A campaign last year for Elle Macpherson Intimates, a lingerie brand, at first glance looked like a static black poster with company’s logo in white.
It was really a video screen, an interactive one that reacted to motion. Wave an arm and the black dissolved to reveal a video of a woman frolicking in her lingerie.
Some storefront campaigns even use live characters, such as one a few years back for the Sci Fi Channel’s miniseries “5ive Days to Midnight,” in which a dozen actors played scenes from the series.
What are now arising are internet-based digital networks that allow an advertiser to have its message appearing in a number of storefronts at once. Creative can be changed in an instant, all from one location.
Budweiser recently ran spots on a storefront network that targeted baseball fans near Fenway Park in Boston.
Markets
Vacant storefront advertising is available in pretty much any market that has vacant retail locations, which is about every market that matters in the U.S.
Numbers
Last winter, 43rd Street and Broadway in New York's Times Square averaged 118,000 pedestrians on weekdays between 8:30 a.m. and midnight, and that figure rose to 171,000 on weekends, according to a foot traffic study for the Times Square Alliance.
In the second quarter of this year the vacancy rate for U.S. neighborhood and community shopping centers was 8.2 percent, according to Reis, a research firm. The mall vacancy rate was 6.3 percent during that period, the highest since 2002.
How it is measured
Data from local merchant associations on foot traffic in the neighborhood is the standard of measure for calculating ad impressions.
What product categories do well
Automotive, electronics, entertainment, telecommunications, lottery, liquor, travel, banking, retail and fast food are among the popular categories.
Demographics
Campaigns can target by location, reaching a range of ethnic, socio-economic and age groups.
Making the buy
Inwindow Outdoor: Offers ads in traditional storefronts, both static and interactive, as well as ads in mall storefronts. A four-week campaign in a traditional storefront is around $25,000 per location, while mall storefronts are less.
WindowGain: Operates networks of storefront screens in Boston, Providence and London. A one-month campaign runs between $4,000 and $7,000.
Who’s already in storefronts
HSBC, Sony Pictures, Target, Vaio, LG, Red Bull, MTV, Boost Mobile, Discovery Channel, Converse, Disney, Jet Blue, Delta, Blue Man Group, Boston.com, Verizon.
What they’re saying
"Mannequins come up often, but we advise against it. Pedestrians are familiar with looking at mannequins in a retail space and they don’t associate that with an ad, so the message isn’t clear." –
Jeff Cohen, managing partner at Inwindow Outdoor.
Web site info
Inwindow Outdoor
http://www.inwindowoutdoor.com
WindowGain
http://www.windowgain.com
Neverstop
http://www.neverstop.com
