THE International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) declared Arabian Centres, Riyadh, as the 2012 Gold and Silver Awards winner in the New Media category. The 2012 Middle East & North Africa Shopping Centre Awards are designed solely to recognize outstanding achievement in four categories: Traditional Marketing, New Media, NOI Enhancement, Design & Development, and Retail. Recognizing the importance of using emerging technology as a marketing tool to enhance the customer experience and attract more customers, Arabian Centres developed a unified platform using a set of emerging technologies to create and manages its online presence. The platform is based in the cloud to ensure sustainability and maintain information consistency across its 14 current malls and any upcoming malls in the future. To launch its malls newly innovative 12 websites and Facebook pages to the public, Arabian Centres adopted an integrated digital marketing approach to capitalize on its 14 malls across nine major cities and two countries. Over the course of seven weeks, Arabian Centres hosted a competition which asked its customers to use the company's websites, Facebook application, Twitter accounts, QR codes and e-mails to answer one question. By the end of the competition, Arabian Centres Company reached more than three million online customers with 90 million impressions. ICSC announced the winners of the 2012 Middle East & North Africa Shopping Centre Awards during an awards ceremony at RECon Middle East and North Africa in Dubai. In addition, the Arabian Centres is now automatically eligible to win ICSC's VIVA Best of the Best Award. The ICSC VIVA Best of the Best Awards, which recognizes the shopping centre industry's most cutting edge properties, innovative solutions and creative responses to market trends throughout the world, will be presented during ICSC's annual convention, RECon, on May 19-22, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. — SG
