10/29/07 - Ads find parking space at Kimco shopping centers

BY DANIEL WAGNER
October 29, 2007

New Hyde Park-based Kimco Realty Corp. may have more than 180 million square feet of leasable space in its myriad shopping centers, but the company isn't above leasing space by the inch.

An ad campaign this fall at seven of Kimco's shopping centers in the Northeast, including at least three on Long Island - Manhasset, Commack and Plainview - brought promotional messages for the ABC show "Desperate Housewives" to a place Long Islanders had never seen them before: the stripes between parking spaces.

For the most part, reaction from local desperate housewives has been positive, according to Mini Vega, director of ancillary income for Kimco's Northeast area.
"We play around with a lot of different types of products that can generate additional revenue at our shopping centers," Vega said. "It varies by market."

Joshua Weinkranz, Kimco's vice president for the Northeast region, said Kimco had been approached by Golden, Colo.-based Parking Stripe Advertising about placing the newfangled ads in shopping centers that met the ad company's target demographic.

"We have a lot of shopping centers in a lot of different markets, so it's easy for them to come to us and get one-stop shopping," he said.

That's one of the greatest advantages of this new approach to grabbing consumers' attention, according to Parking Stripe Advertising president Becky Osborne.

"We can be extremely granular," she said, referring to the company's ability to target narrowly defined demographic groups. "For instance, if an [advertising] agency wants to reach teenagers, we can go after a school district and secure those school parking lots. Traditional advertising doesn't really reach those young kids."

That's similar to what happened with the "Desperate Housewives" campaign: The marketing company representing the show approached Parking Stripe and said it wanted to launch a campaign at grocery stores in the New York area.

Because Parking Stripe already had a relationship with Kimco and other retail landlords, the ad broker was able to provide the marketers with a list of possible locations for the installation. Kimco's centers fit the bill, and the deal was struck.

Costs to advertisers can run $30 to $50 per stripe, Osborne said. Of that, the landlords get in the neighborhood of $2 per stripe. But she said they don't seem to mind being served such a small piece of the revenue pie.

"It's been very well accepted, because we're taking something that used to be a cost center for these landlords and we're turning it into a profit center," she said.

Kimco's Vega said these are exactly the types of opportunities she's on the lookout for. She said her company is still evaluating feedback to determine if future parking strip campaigns are in the offing.

But since Parking Stripe is growing exponentially and Long Island is a land of many shopping centers, Osborne said, local consumers shouldn't be surprised to see a growing world of advertising at their feet.

BY DANIEL WAGNER
daniel.wagner@newsday.com

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