Malls are dead! Malls are not dead! Just ask MrBeast and Heawon Yoo

Just when we were pronouncing mall traffic as dead in last Sunday’s commentary—OOH Today Weekend Update—Texas Tourism Brought to Life Through AR —Lightbox’s CMO, Heawon Yoo, responded to our challenge regarding the traffic in shopping centers. In Lightbox’s Travel Texas AR campaign we questioned mall traffic and said we would like to see the data. Yoo happily obliged us with an update— HERE. According to Yoo, Lightbox’s network of ~300 malls, saw HIGHER traffic for 1H 2022 vs same period pre-pandemic 2019 (source: MotionWorks). Placer.ai also released a white paper on mall traffic that speaks to the larger universe of malls – still a very positive story.  Yoo says they’ve “been updating their clients on mall traffic recovery since April 2020 and the rebound has been incredible – to the point where advertisers rarely, if ever, question if audiences are in malls”.  Heawon Yoo we stand corrected. Thank you for the data share and update.

But there’s more! As the infomercial goes. Further support answering our question if shopping mall traffic is dead, is this video from Bob Johns, President of BOLDSITE Media, regarding the MrBeast Burger opening at the American Dream Mall. Tens of thousands, yes tens of thousands, of guests came out to American Dream Mall to experience the first-ever MrBeast Burger restaurant and to meet the famous YouTuber – MrBeast. Such an incredible opening! 🍔The video says it all. The crowd was phenomenal. See the video bottom of this post.

One final note on the American Dream Mall story and MrBeast Burger: yes we know the traffic was brought about by the famous YouTuber MrBeast more than it was for the opening of the first physical MrBeast Burger location. See the Mashable story here —Why did 10,000 people show up to buy a MrBeast Burger? But traffic is traffic. If that kind of promotion is what it takes to generate mall traffic or business, I suspect we’ll see more promotions like this or sure as hell should.

If you don’t know who MrBeast is, you are out of touch. Waaaay out of touch! Don’t feel too bad, we only discovered him two days ago. What a phenomenal story and success. 

Why isn’t OOH doing anything like this? My hope someone in OOH after reading this will try. And why not? The real opportunity lies with The Big 3 to put something together to get it rolling or perhaps an independent non traditional OOH Owner who really understands social media and is a risk taker. 

In January 2022, Forbes ranked MrBeast as YouTube’s highest-earning creator, earning an estimated $54 million in 2021. Jimmy Donaldson better known as MrBeast, is a twenty four year old YouTuber, businessman, philanthropist.

Who’d a thunk it?