Europe’s mall giant pivots to social network for recovery

Bloomberg

Europe’s biggest mall landlord plans to turn half a billion shoppers into a huge new advertising audience.
After two-years of turmoil unleashed by Covid-19,
Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is working on how it can leverage its shoppers as it charts its recovery to pre-pandemic levels. At the heart of its strategy is a plan to track, monitor and profile the 550 million visitors to its malls to sell targeted advertising to the brands that rent its stores.
“Until recently the only thing we could see was how many people were entering and
existing our malls,” Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield Chief Executive Officer Jean-Marie Tritant said in an interview. “Now we have different sensors and we can use Wifi in a fully GDPR compliant way to really understand who is using our assets.”
The pandemic compounded a crisis in European retail as stores already struggling to compete with a shift to ecommerce were forced to close for months on end. That triggered a period of upheaval for Unibail which became the subject of a successful activist campaign that ousted its management and called for the company to focus on Europe.
After a series of asset sales, the firm now expects net rental income to return to pre-pandemic levels in 2024. The company will reinstate its dividend from fiscal year 2023 and predicts that earnings will have fully recovered the following year. The pivot to advertising is forecast to bring in 75 million euros ($83.5 million) of media revenue by 2024, up from 30 million euros in 2021.