ADvantages: It’s in the Name

Tysons Corner Centre in Washington, D.C. (USA), focuses its advertising campaign on brands, brands and more brands

The Goal:
To emphasize the size and variety of Tysons Corner Centre’s retail offer in a revamped advertising campaign appropriately titled Where the Stores Are.

The Strategy:
The campaign, developed by Rosenthal Partners, mixes outdoor, radio, interactive and print components to present Tysons as the leading shopping centre in its area. It incorporates a sizeable roster of tenants so that consumers know exactly what to expect when they shop at the centre.
The most visually striking element of the campaign has to be the outdoor execution, whose four bus kings were designed to make any label lover drool. Each one features a model wearing a fashion item that represents one of Tysons’ broad merchandise categories: a pair of sunglasses, a shawl, a shoe and a hat.
“The intrigue is that the objects are made up of store names,” says Erik Kulczycky, director of marketing and PR at Tysons. “We’ve received nothing but high praise for our advertising campaign. People love it.”
Continuing to strengthen and sustain its market position by focusing primarily on radio advertising, as it has done over the past decade, Tysons produced four 60-second spots. This time, the store names are woven into dialogues with double-entendres that create vignettes: a fairy take, a soap opera, a ballroom drama and a detective story.
In the latter, called Bean’s Story, the dialogue includes this exchange: “Are you Mister L.L. Bean? Yes, and you? Detectives Abercrombie & Fitch. We’d like to talk to you about your missing neighbour, April Cornell. Also known as the Dairy Queen.” Then a raspy, monotone voice is injected into the dialogue to accentuate select shopping centre tenants. Bean’s Story actually won Tysons top honours in the retail store category at the 2004 London International Awards for Advertising and Design (www.liaawards.com).
Tysons intends to run its ad campaign through the middle of this year, when it will be time to go back to the drawing board in anticipation of the mall’s new wing, with the same goal of giving shoppers plenty of reasons to shop Where the Stores Are.