n a strategic move out of its online domain, Yahoo! will offer hundreds of shoppers large-format, full-motion video on screens in malls in New York and Los Angeles. The content will feature news headlines, sports, entertainment, financial information and the Yahoo! Buzz Index, which will be refreshed every 15 minutes. The screens were suspended from ceilings in food courts of the shopping malls in the metro areas.
These screens are the first in a planned network involving 200 malls in the top 20 markets in the US over the next two and a half years. The network is being installed by the Clear Channel Digital Mall Network, a joint venture of Clear Channel Malls and Digital Advertising Network, based in Canada. Clear Channel Malls has a long history of constructing and operating a wide variety of shopping centre-based advertising platforms in public areas.
This promotional technique is already popular in Canada. Research by Starch Research Services shows that utilising shopping mall food courts provides the longest exposure to a selling message, a full 32 minutes, versus other shopping mall locales. Another study by ICSC Research suggests that 45 per cent of all people who visit the mall make a food court purchase, resulting in average sale per square foot that are more than three times higher than all other stores. Additionally, more than 50 per cent of all shoppers felt they were staying longer because they could break to eat or drink something at the food court.... more