Simon bets America still wants to meet at the mall

Simon, the largest owner of shopping malls in the United States, began rolling out "It's a Simon Thing" on September 15 — one of the biggest national campaigns in the company's history, and a deliberate argument that the mall is still where American life happens.

The platform, created in-house, spans more than 200 malls and premium outlets plus online shopping, and it exists in part to make the corporate brand mean something to shoppers. "We needed a platform to tell a broad story, not just about the mall but for all of our other properties," chief marketing officer Lee Sterling told ADWEEK.

The creative leans on ordinary specifics: first jobs, met friends, milestones celebrated, things found that nobody was looking for. Sterling calls the properties "America's third place," a phrase that has been doing heavy lifting in retail real estate for years but rarely gets the campaign to back it up. Here it does, and the strategic move is to sell the behavior rather than the square footage.

It follows the award-winning Meet Me @themall work from 2024, which discovered — to the mild surprise of everyone who had written the format off — that Gen Z genuinely likes going to the mall with friends. "It's a Simon Thing" scales that insight from a single audience to the whole portfolio, and is built to flex across different properties, experiences, and generations rather than run once and retire.

The bet is worth naming plainly. Every dollar Simon puts behind real-world discovery is a wager that physical retail's advantage is social, not transactional. On that ground, a landlord with 200-plus destinations has something no marketplace can copy.