Phillips Edison & Company

CLIENT CHALLENGE

Missed opportunities to tell the PECO story.

Pick up any issue of Shopping Centers Today, and you’ll see a dozen ads for retail properties that only show one thing: the shopping center itself. Other than the monotony of using a building as the hero, this type of advertising doesn’t say a single thing about the brand of the property, or its owner. Phillips Edison & Company (PECO), a privately-owned developer and owner of more than 320 grocery-anchored shopping centers across the country, engaged COHN to conceive a better approach.

OUR SOLUTION

Reimagine the retail real estate ad playbook.

The objective of PECO’s ad campaign is to position Phillips Edison & Company as the most hands-on, experienced privately-owned developer and owner of grocery-anchored shopping centers in the nation. And the ads would not feature a building/property. The idea was that potential tenants seeing the ad should think, “Any time I consider locating my business in a grocery-anchored center, I need to talk to the team at Phillips Edison & Company first.”

Each execution has an unexpected single word graphically displayed at its center, surrounded by bright, fresh photography of grocery store items shot very close up and rendered as three dimensional. Each execution connects the word/image to a PECO theme.The single, bold word grabs the reader’s attention and also serves to introduce us to a key PECO trait or area of expertise. (We don’t just say we have a passion for what we do – we use the word “ZEST” and some zingy lemons to showcase it.)

RESULTS

A campaign that people are talking about.

"Engage the Senses" ad campaign captures the essence of what makes Phillips Edison unique within the industry. The memorable visual applications have been well received by the entire PECO leadership team and became the muse for a new social media strategy to shine a bright light on the People of PECO with monthly themes that sync directly with the ad campaign for enhanced consistency and recall. This campaign approach will never get lost in a magazine or mistaken for a competitor. It is as specialized, unique and engaging as PECO is.