Retail Media Age Editor-in-Chief Justin Pearse sat down with Chris Lynham, Director of Media, Westfield Rise to discuss the shopping centre’s role in the retail media ecosystem.
What is Westfield Rise and how do you operate as a media business?
Westfield Rise is the in-house media agency of Westfield, and we’re just coming up to our third anniversary. The purpose of the launch was to give us a distinct identity as a media owner, separate from the property arm of the business. We focus on three main areas: digital out-of-home, experiential events, and long-term brand partnerships.
We’ve had a digital out-of-home network in our UK malls since 2008, starting with Westfield London and then Westfield Stratford. Most of our direct sales are from experiential and event sponsorship, while the media itself is mostly sold through our partners, such as JCDecaux and Ocean Outdoor.
What’s your view on how Westfield fits into the broader retail media conversation?
We sit as close to retail media as you can get, without being traditional retail media ourselves. We don’t have transactional or personal data, so we can’t offer the same kind of attribution models that a retailer can. But we’re very much at the point of proximity to purchase, and that’s where our opportunity lies.
We’re working hard to develop a model where the brands that retailers sell can be promoted within the mall environment. In many ways, the retailers themselves are becoming our retail media clients.
We’re strong in brand-building and fame, but now we’re focused on how to prove effectiveness in driving footfall and sales.
How are you approaching the challenge of proving media effectiveness?
We’ve developed our own audience qualification platform that uses video analysis and AI. It’s entirely GDPR compliant, with no biometric or stored data. It can reidentify movement patterns anonymously, helping us understand the customer journey throughout the mall.
It’s been live in our Paris malls for a year and is now operational in both Westfield London and Stratford. It gives us genuine drive-to-store metrics for digital out-of-home and experiential campaigns.
For the first time, we can tell if someone saw a screen or event, and what they did next. That’s invaluable for both our own reporting and for our retail tenants.
Can this data help individual retailers or brands activate more effectively?
Absolutely.
We can now build audience segments based on store visitation behaviour. For example, we know which screens and day parts over-index with people who go on to visit beauty stores, tech outlets, or cafés. It’s not the same as full retail media data, but in an out-of-home context, it’s very powerful.
We’re also building a retailer data portal. For a flat annual fee, retailers get access to operational data and some media inventory in the mall. It’s designed to be incremental, tapping into local budgets and product-level marketing rather than large national campaigns.
What about your creative approach? How are you working to keep content fresh and effective?
Creativity is essential. We’ve always benefitted from innovation through partners like Ocean Outdoor, who’ve brought us deep screen 3D formats, augmented reality, and neuroscience-led design. Their digital creative competition has been a brilliant platform for showcasing work in our malls.
That said, we know we need to do more on our own side. We’re working on ideas like gamification, treasure hunts, and richer storytelling that go beyond basic branding messages. The risk in any mall environment is visual overload, so we want campaigns that truly engage and don’t just blend into the background.
How does Westfield Rise integrate with programmatic or digital buying models?
That’s still evolving. We’ve done some work with Google and DV360, but programmatic doesn’t yet work seamlessly with digital out-of-home in the way it does for digital display. We thought our data might elevate our inventory, but it’s clear every agency has its own ecosystem. It’s complex and we’re still some way off tapping into programmatic budgets at scale.
However, we are exploring dynamic creative, including campaigns triggered by live footfall data. If store traffic is low but mall footfall is high, that could trigger ads. We’re not quite there on real-time processing yet, but it’s the direction we’re heading.
How do you see Westfield’s role evolving as the retail media market continues to grow?
We’ve certainly benefitted from the overall growth in demand for mall media. Categories like tech, beauty, and entertainment keep returning. But in terms of tapping into the true boom in retail media, most of that budget is still staying within retailer-owned assets.
There’s huge potential in unlocking just a small share of that spend into the wider mall environment, but it hinges on us proving performance. In Paris, we’re already seeing uplifts in store traffic for campaigns, even for luxury brands. The benchmarks are robust and consistent. We just need to continue demonstrating that we can deliver measurable results.
What’s your background and how did you come to lead Westfield Rise?I’ve been at Westfield since 2007, after working as Head of Media at BAA. I’ve always been on the retail side of media, and it’s been fascinating to watch the sector evolve. We were one of the first to launch a fully digital out-of-home network in 2008. Of course, early adoption meant strong returns, but now we’re in a much more commoditised landscape.
Westfield has always been commercially minded, and during the pandemic, we realised media was going to bounce back fast. That’s when we started taking a more media-owner mindset. Retailers may not pay rent in the same way anymore, but they will invest in performance. That’s where we’re heading.
