CENTER MAKES AN ART OF ATTRACTING SHOPPERS

BY IAN RITTER

Artist Norman Rockwell, dead for 25 years, has nevertheless been hard at work attracting customers to Dulles (Va.) Town Center in recent years. A month before the Washington, D.C.-area mall’s July 1999 opening, it displayed a Rockwell newspaper advertisement of a man setting an old clock, adding the slogan “It’s almost time!”

Another image, advertising a health fair at the center, is the picture showing a doctor holding his stethoscope to a doll held by a little girl. Others images — there have been more than 30 — include boys studying (to advertise back-to-school shopping), baseball umpires watching raindrops fall, with the slogan “Open rain or shine,” and a picture of Santa Claus.

The company that licensed the Rockwell art to Lerner Corp., owner of Dulles Town Center, is Indianapolis-based Curtis Publishing Co., which owns the more than 400 Rockwell images that appeared on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post magazine. Curtis also owns thousands of pictures drawn by other artists.

Bethesda, Md.-based Lerner chose the Norman Rockwell theme because of the flexibility the images gave the company, since there were so many different scenes to choose from says Clarke Green, the company’s director of marketing. Dulles also needed to compete with Taubman Centers’ Fair Oaks Shopping Center, 15 miles to the south in Fairfax, Va., and Wilmorite’s Tysons Corner Center, 15 miles to the east in McLean, Va., both of which have marketing budgets “three to four times” that of Dulles, he says.

“We had to be a little crafty in finding something that was recognizable,” Green said.

It is difficult to gauge how much of an effect they have had on its traffic, he said, since the mall has used Rockwell art in its advertising since the center opened. But through focus groups, Lerner says it has found that 80 percent of the people who visit Dulles associate it with Rockwell.

Rockwell’s cozy Americana themes are likely to be especially popular since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to Jessica DeLise, president of the Pelham, N.Y.-based Breton Agency, an advertising firm that does corporate marketing campaigns for shopping center owners.

Curtis would not disclose the specific financial details of its deal with Lerner, but it charges royalty fees based on the number of times a licensed picture is used, be it in a newspaper ad or in a direct mailing.

The images can work at other malls because of their broad appeal to the public, says Curtis CEO Joan SerVaas.

“We’d like to be able to take our artwork and adapt it,” she said. “There are all sorts of tie-ins that could go with that.” SerVaas said Curtis is trying to market the images to various malls and shopping center owners around the country. Once Curtis signs a contract with a particular mall, however, it will not then do business with a competing center.

“Our goal is not to saturate a market, but to create special relationships with malls that want to develop,” SerVaas said.

Curtis has also licensed its images to such corporations as Eastman Kodak Co., Mercedes Benz and The Walt Disney Co.

Curtis gained control of the pictures when Beurt SerVaas, father of the CEO, bought The Saturday Evening Post in 1970. The magazine had stopped publishing in 1969, but Beurt SerVaas moved it to Indianapolis and revived it in 1971. It is published to this day under a different company owned by Beurt SerVaas called the Saturday Evening Post Society.

Reprinted with permission from Shopping Centers Today published by the International Council of Shopping Centers