“The line between the physical store and the online order will keep fading. That showrooming habit is getting stronger, not weaker, so the malls that make it easy to look, touch and then decide are the ones that will hold on to those customers,” Răzvan Marincoi, Product Manager at Generatik and creator of The Mall Effect Index told The Diplomat-Bucharest.
“There’s also something specific to Romania worth understanding. We never really built the Western European tradition of public squares and promenades, places to just be, without a reason. The mall quietly took over that role. In 2026, 42% of visitors said they go to the mall to socialise, up from 35% the year before, and Gen Z spends more time there than any other group, about 177 minutes a visit. So, the mall has effectively become the main public space of urban Romania. For a brand, the lesson is that you’re not advertising inside a shop, you’re advertising inside the place where people actually spend their free time.”
For those who don’t know Generatik, how would you describe the company and what it does?
The simplest way to put it is that Generatik is an online platform for offline advertising. The ads it deals with are the physical ones inside a mall, like the banner on the escalator, the lightbox by the entrance, the big print you walk past on your way to the cinema. That physical, offline space is the core of what we do. The platform can also handle the digital screens and totems, so a brand can plan both in one place, but the heart of it is the physical side. That’s the part of advertising that everyone had left in the era of phone calls and spreadsheets, and that’s the part we brought online.
Generatik comes out of Brand Management Europe, where we’ve worked in indoor advertising for more than twenty years. The problem we set out to fix was unglamorous but very real. If you wanted to run an ad in a mall, you used to lose a day or two just emailing and calling around to find out what space was free, and then more time to actually book it. We put all of that in one place. You log in, you see what’s available, you book it, the same way you’d book anything else online.
How has the way brands use mall advertising changed?
The honest answer is that people used to book on instinct, and now they want proof. Years ago you advertised in a mall because it felt right, or because you had a contact there. Today the first thing a brand wants to know is who will see the ad, whether they’ll remember it, and whether it leads to a sale. That’s a much healthier conversation, and it’s the reason a measurement like ours matters now in a way it wouldn’t have ten years ago.
The other change is who shows up. It used to be mostly shops and beauty brands. Now it’s banks, telecom companies, car brands , and they’re not there by accident. They’ve worked out that the person walking past their ad in a mall is relaxed, in a good mood, and already out to spend money. That’s a rare combination, and it’s hard to buy anywhere else.
Why do malls still matter when everyone is online?
It comes down to time and attention, which are the two things advertising is really fighting for. The average person spends about 157 minutes in a mall in a single visit. That’s roughly the length of a film. On your phone, an ad has maybe a second before your thumb moves. You can’t compare the two.
And this is the part people find surprising: spending at the mall is going up, not down. The average per visit went from 327 lei in 2024 to 383 lei in 2026. That’s a 17% rise, and because it’s above inflation, it’s a real increase in what people choose to spend, not just prices climbing.
The biggest misunderstanding is treating the mall and the internet as rivals. They aren’t. About 69% of mall visitors do what’s called showrooming, meaning they go and touch the product in the store and then order it online later. So very often the mall is where the online purchase is actually decided. The shop does the convincing and the website gets the credit.
What made you create The Mall Effect Index, and what was missing?
There was no honest, repeatable measure of what malls do to people’s behaviour. You had footfall counts, and you had the occasional flattering story in a sales deck, but nothing you could trust and check again a year later.
The clearest way I explain the gap is this. There’s already an index that tells you what shops report selling, and another that tells you what mall owners earn in rent. What nobody was measuring was the person in between, the consumer, and what they actually do at the moment and in the place where they decide to buy. That’s the hole The Mall Effect Index fills. We run it together with Reveal Marketing Research, so it isn’t just our own numbers about our own business.
And the score isn’t an abstract figure. When the index sits at 70 out of 100, it’s telling you something about how confident people feel about spending and how healthy the malls are as a business. That’s why it’s read by investors and analysts, not only by advertisers.
Why follow people over several years instead of doing one study?
Because a single study only tells you where you stand today. Three years tell you which direction things are moving, and the direction is what actually changes a decision.
Ad recall is the easiest example. On its own, “82% of people remember seeing a mall ad” is just a number. The real story is that it has gone up three years running, at a time when almost every other kind of advertising is quietly losing people’s attention. To make that comparison honest, we use the exact same method every year , the same questions, the same kind of nationally representative sample, around 2,400 people in total across the three waves. That way we’re comparing like with like, not putting two unrelated numbers side by side and hoping they mean something.
Did anything in the results surprise you?
Yes, and it’s my favourite thing in the whole study. We call it the Conversion Gap.
When we ask people whether they would buy something after seeing an ad in a mall, 57% say yes. But when we ask whether they actually did, 64% say yes. That’s odd, because in almost all behavioural research it goes the other way, people say they’ll do more than they really do. In the mall, it flips. More people buy than will admit they would.
The way I describe it is that the Conversion Gap is the gram of gold that mall advertising adds. When we go to the mall, we’re already in the mood to fall in love with shopping. Any message lands better there than it would almost anywhere else. What’s new is that we can finally put a number on it.
There’s a very human reason behind those seven points, too. If you grew up with the feeling that money goes out faster than it comes in, it’s not easy to admit you spent, even on an anonymous survey. The buying still happens. People just don’t like saying it out loud. So that small gap is also a little window into how a whole generation thinks about money.
Are people coming to the mall to buy something specific, or is it impulse?
It’s both at once, and that mix is exactly what makes the mall special. We gave the moment a name, The Golden Moment.
Picture it. You go in for one thing, a pair of shoes. Two and a half hours later, after walking past plenty of ads, going into a few stores, stopping for a coffee, maybe running into a friend, you leave with something you never planned to buy. That isn’t really impulse, and it certainly isn’t manipulation. It’s what happens when being physically there, being in a good mood, and quietly soaking up messages along the way all line up at the same time. A website simply can’t recreate that feeling, and that’s the whole point.
Retail media is a big topic globally. How do your findings fit into that?
Most of the global conversations about retail media is about the digital side, mostly selling ad space on shopping websites and using people’s past purchases to target them. What we’re doing is bringing the physical side into that same conversation and measuring it just as seriously.
What we found matches what everyone agrees on globally, which is that being close to the moment of purchase is what makes advertising work. The difference is that we can show it holding true over three years rather than one. And it isn’t only a Romanian story, indoor mall traffic across Europe grew by around 10% last year. So this is a direction the whole region is moving in, and the data we have happens to be some of the clearest evidence of it.
How can mall owners and brands actually use this?
For a mall owner, the message is straightforward. Your building isn’t only space you rent out. It’s an asset, and a large part of that asset is physical advertising space you already own. Now there’s a way to sell it online easily, and a way to show, with real numbers, how alive the place is.
We built the index to be useful at three levels. The first costs nothing: you treat the national score of 70 as a reference point, the way you’d glance at an economic indicator, to see where physical retail is heading. The second is a measurement for your own mall, so you get your own score to set against 70, which is genuinely useful when you’re negotiating rents or reporting to shareholders. The third comes later, once enough malls measure themselves and you can compare by type , for instance, “my mall scores 78, which is above the average for premium city malls.” That’s how a measure like this slowly becomes an industry standard.
For a brand, the useful signals are sitting right there in the data. People are spending above inflation, 55% come every week, and most of them are showrooming. So you plan your mall tenant’s presence as the first step that leads to the sale, not as a separate thing competing with online.
What trends do you expect in the next few years?
The line between the physical store and the online order will keep fading. That showrooming habit is getting stronger, not weaker, so the malls that make it easy to look, touch and then decide are the ones that will hold on to those customers.
There’s also something specific to Romania worth understanding. We never really built the Western European tradition of public squares and promenades, places to just be, without a reason. The mall quietly took over that role. In 2026, 42% of visitors said they go to the mall to socialise, up from 35% the year before, and Gen Z spends more time there than any other group, about 177 minutes a visit. So the mall has effectively become the main public space of urban Romania. For a brand, the lesson is that you’re not advertising inside a shop, you’re advertising inside the place where people actually spend their free time.
How do you see the role of malls changing as shopping and media come together?
The mall is slowly turning into a media asset, not just a shopping centre. The owner stops being only a landlord and becomes someone with a real audience and ad space that can finally be measured and sold properly, rather than guessed at.
Romania has an unusual advantage here. Our malls are newer and more modern than a lot of what you find in Western Europe, so there’s less old baggage and more freedom to get the data side right from the beginning. That’s the space we work in, helping an owner understand what their space is really worth as a media channel, and giving brands a simple way to use it. The malls that do well over the next decade will be the ones that treat advertising income as a proper part of the business and not an afterthought.
What’s next for The Mall Effect Index?
The next step is measuring individual malls, not just the country as a whole. Along with Reveal Marketing Research, we’re putting together a standard way to do it, around 150 to 200 people interviewed per mall, using the same questions as the national study so the numbers line up exactly. That’s coming in late 2026, and it’s what lets each mall have its own score instead of borrowing the national one.
After that, the aim is to build up comparisons by category and, over time, become the standard reference for indoor advertising in Romania and then across the wider region, especially Poland, coming 2027. The interest we’re already getting from international brands and investors tells us nobody has built that yet. We’d like it to be us.
Răzvan Marincoi is Product Manager at Generatik and the creator of The Mall Effect Index. Generatik is an online platform, built by Brand Management Europe, for booking offline physical mall advertising in real time, while also able to accommodate digital mall advertising; the offline, physical side is its core purpose. It has run more than 4,000 campaigns across three markets and over 500 locations. The Mall Effect Index is the first index to measure real consumer behaviour in Romanian malls, produced by Generatik together with Reveal Marketing Research, using the same survey method each year with a nationally representative urban sample of around 2,400 people across three waves (2024, 2025, 2026). The 2026 edition scored 70 out of 100, with mall-advertising conversion at 64%, the highest in three years. More at generatik.com and themalleffect.ro.