Simon Just Launched an Ad Network. Marketers Should Pay Attention to What It Connects

The platform closes a retail measurement gap as e-commerce tracking becomes harder.

EXPERT OPINION BY TEMILOLA AGBEDE

Simon Property Group World Headquarters. Photo:

Jared Blechman, Simon Property Group’s chief revenue officer, recently described what advertisers want from the ad platform Simon launched in August across more than 200 malls and mixed-use destinations.

Blechman noted that today’s marketers need “partners who can prove a campaign actually moved someone to visit, engage and buy.” That’s the promise behind the Simon Media Network: to pair foot traffic with identity so a mall visit becomes something a brand can act on instead of a number on a dashboard.

That pairing isn’t new to commerce. It’s the same one direct-to-consumer brands built a decade of growth on, just running in the opposite direction.

The DTC playbook this echoes

Part of what made e-commerce so appealing for the past fifteen years was exactly this. A brand could finally own the connection between what a customer did and who that customer was instead of selling through a retailer that kept both behind its own wall.

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Email capture, site behavior, and purchase history all sat in one place a brand controlled directly. Physical retail never had a version of that. A shopper walking through a mall was, for most of retail history, unmeasurable and anonymous the moment they stepped away from a register.

Now, Simon is closing that gap. Closing it is a visibility story, though, not a directive on which channel deserves a brand’s investment.

Two gaps closing from opposite directions

Foot traffic attribution isn’t new either. Placer.ai, GroundTruth, and several other location-intelligence platforms have spent years matching ad exposure to device-level visits, letting marketers see whether campaigns move people into stores. Foursquare built an early version of this and even branded a feature “Closed Loop Attribution”—the identical phrase Simon uses now.

Source: www.inc.com