Margaret Cooper is the Director of Marketing for Cushman & Wakefield's asset services division in Canada, overseeing marketing strategy across their portfolio of enclosed retail properties from coast to coast. She has spent twenty years in shopping centre and retail marketing, working on both the agency side and the client side, including a formative stretch at Yorkdale Shopping Centre that shaped her read on what drives traffic, what earns trust, and where the real friction lives at the intersection of brand and operations.
CRE Marketing Innovators is hosted by Chris Bryce, CEO of Dotfusion, a digital agency that has spent 25 years building and operating content infrastructure for enterprise organisations in commercial real estate and beyond, with clients including Oxford Properties and Brookfield. The show is built for marketing leaders in the CRE space: direct conversations about what is actually changing, with practitioners who are living it.
In this first episode, Chris and Margaret dig into what retail and shopping centre marketing actually looks like on the ground right now: not the pitch deck version, but the day-to-day decisions that marketing managers at individual properties are navigating with tighter budgets, shifting shopper behaviour, and AI moving faster than most teams are structured to absorb. From influencer strategy to the search visibility problem, the conversation is grounded in what Margaret's team is doing across Canada today.
They also get into the bigger picture: why the mall is having a cultural moment again, what skills a marketer actually needs to get hired in this industry right now, and why the pathway into CRE marketing looks quite different than it did even five years ago.
Key topics include:
- Influencer marketing for shopping centres: Why micro and nano influencers with precisely targeted audiences often outperform accounts with 100,000 followers, and how Cushman builds longer-term partnerships rather than one-off posts.
- Trust as the core currency: Influencer content wins because it comes from someone the audience already trusts, an advantage traditional advertising has never been able to replicate at the same cost.
- AI and search visibility: Search is now multi-generational and multi-modal — voice, photo, circled images, and "vibe searches" are all in play. Margaret's view is that CRE teams are behind their own retailers and need to close that gap fast, and that content volume through influencers and AI is the only realistic path.
- AI buying back creative time: Used strategically, AI frees marketing teams to focus on experiential activations and partnerships, the work that actually moves shoppers through the door.
- The mall as the third place: Gen Z and Alpha shoppers are coming back to malls, not just to shop but to connect. Sold-out Earth Day workshops in Calgary and 1,500-person March Break craft events in Ottawa are early proof that community programming is working.
- The shrinking junior pathway: AI is closing entry-level opportunities faster than the industry is ready to acknowledge. Both Chris and Margaret explore what that means for the next generation coming into CRE marketing.
- Skills for the modern CRE marketer: Photography and video production are now table-stakes for marketing roles in this industry. The $50,000 video shoot budget is largely gone, and the teams winning are the ones where the marketer is also the creator.
The through-line of the whole conversation is Margaret's core conviction: if you are in retail and shopping centre marketing, you have to love change, because the ground never stops shifting.
🎧 Listen now and join the conversation!
