The levy in the lease

Read a Gulf mall lease from the tenant's side and there is a line in it that nobody reads as marketing.

Base rent. Service charge. Then a marketing contribution, a percentage on top of the rent or of turnover, paid every month into a fund the mall spends on its own promotion.

The operator's own marketing budget lives somewhere else, in a spreadsheet on a laptop in the office behind the kitchen. A photographer twice a year, a few boosted posts, a print run of menus, a creator who comes for a meal. Every line in it was argued over by the person who also writes the rota.

The contribution is frequently larger than that whole spreadsheet, and not one line of it was chosen by them.

What it buys turns up in the summer. The mall campaign, the radio, the family zone in the quiet wing, the car on a turntable under the skylight, the draw with a spend threshold on it. All of it moves footfall into the building, which is the landlord's business, and footfall into a building is not covers in one restaurant on the second floor.

Then the invitation arrives to take part, and the tenant who has already paid for the campaign pays again. A funded discount to appear in the promotion. Staff hours for the activation weekend. A banner to the mall's specification.

Nobody in that chain is behaving badly. The mall's marketing team reports to the landlord and its brief is the asset. A tenant who asks what the fund bought is sent a deck of impressions, and has no vote, because the alternative to the lease is not being in the mall.

The summer promotion is free to the tenant only on the tenant's own budget sheet. It was bought in the lease, spent in a month the tenant had no say in, on a customer the mall chose.