Macy’s and Facebook are collaborating to provide a pop-up space for more than 100 SMB e-Commerce retailers at the department store’s “The Market @ Macy’s” locations. Featured brands include Bespoke Post, Bourbon & Boots, Charleston Gourmet Burger Company, Inspiralized, ISH, Link AKC, Love Your Melon, LuMee, Mented Cosmetics, NeuroGum and Two Blind Brothers.
Facebook’s Small Business Pop-Up opened Nov. 5, 2018 and will operate through the holidays, until Feb. 2, 2019 at nine The Market @ Macy’s locations, within stores in New York City, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., San Antonio, Texas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
For the first three weeks of the pop-up’s lifespan, Facebook is running a unique advertising campaign in New York City’s Grand Central Station that celebrates 11 of the brands to be found at Macy’s flagship Herald Square NYC location.
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The campaign includes:
- Nearly 600 individual ad units in 36 designs across 115 locations within Grand Central;
- Ads on Facebook and Instagram later in the holiday season; and
- Complementary digital ads built by Facebook’s Creative Shop for participating brands, designed to build awareness and drive sales for products being sold in-store.
This is the latest outside-the-box partnership for Macy’s, which has invested in retail-as-a-service tech company b8ta and introduced the exclusive Goodful home products line from Buzzfeed online and in stores.
An important question for the department store retailer is how much benefit it will reap from the pop-ups compared to both Facebook and the emerging brands setting up shop in the stores. A lot will depend on the value of the data that’s collected to the various parties.
“When millions of items are just a click away, customers crave uniqueness,” said Chris Petersen, President of Integrated Marketing Solutions in a RetailWire discussion. “Limited supply piques even more interest. What a great opportunity for bespoke-type digital brands to get customer exposure. Macy’s has a great opportunity to be first and unique in offering this ‘phygital’ experiment. And Facebook gets its toe in the water as ‘broker’ and platform. There are all kinds of questions about whether this will scale. The best part is that it is highly measurable, digitally and physically. The worst that can happen is that the brands, Macy’s and Facebook, walk away with a ton of learning and insights.”