A visit to the mall could be quite fruitful for fashion followers this May, as Elle Canada magazine brings its prize-filled Spring Style Lounge to four Toronto-area shopping centres.
A partnership between Montreal-based Ivanhoe Cambridge and Elle Canada, the promotion starts the first week of May and runs until the last. It includes four Ontario malls: Upper Canada Mall in Newmarket, Mapleview Shopping Centre in Burlington, Oakville Place and Vaughan Mills. Each stop lasts five days, except Vaughan Mills, which will last a week. Three official sponsors are on board: BlackBerry, Fuze beverages and H&M.
For each event, the Spring Style Lounge – built by Ivanhoe Cambridge for the promotion – will be set up in a high-traffic zone of the mall. It will feature trend ‘seminars’ by Elle Canada fashion editor Anthony Mitropoulos and H&M and a ‘fashion closet’ (a term commonly used to describe a magazine’s trove of fashion goodies) filled with H&M gear and items from other retailers in the malls. At each stop, Fuze beverages will also be serving real-fruit ‘fashionista cocktails'(non-alcoholic, of course) to loungers.
BlackBerry’s sponsorship comes to life with the ‘Cool Closet Contest,’ in which the brand will snap pictures of visitors with its new, yet-to-be-disclosed smartphone – which will just be hitting the market in May. The photos will be uploaded to the Elle Canada Flickr page (not yet active) – where participants will be encouraged to post them to their own social networks – and random draws will take place at each event for phone giveaways.
‘We wanted an opportunity to bring our brand out to the consumer,’ Avra Goldenblatt, director, communications and promotions, Transcontinental, tells MiC. ‘We’re always looking at more interactive opportunities for the readers and consumers to interact with Elle Canada and Ivanhoe Cambridge was looking to bring a fashion and beauty interactive opportunity into some of their malls. Together, we came up with the Elle Style Lounge.’
The event will be promoted to consumers via the Elle Canada website, the brand’s social media properties and its e-blast and e-newsletter database of 51,000 readers. Ivanhoe Cambridge will be promoting it with tent cards in its food courts and advertising on its in-mall digital screens. The estimated reach of the promotion is 300,000 people at Mapleview and Oakville malls, 500,000 at Upper Canada Mall and over a million at Vaughan Mills.
