Department store ruin
Lamarr: How Benko’s manager beat the advertising drum
In mid-June, the former head of press at the Signa Group gave a small group of people a deep insight into his work for René Benko, Austria's best-known bankrupt: the communications man gave a talk at a Vienna city center agency that looks after the financially ailing Signa's head of finance, among others ...
As part of his PR presentation, Benko's communications man threw a slide on the wall. It read: "Signa / Lamarr vs. Kronen Zeitung 2021".
The background: The "Krone" had always reported critically on the planned shopping block in Vienna's Mariahilfer Straße and questioned its necessity.
A building skeleton as a memorial to megalomania
And rightly so, as has become clear since the collapse of the opaque Signa conglomerate. The construction site has been at a standstill for 190 days. Since then, a skeleton of a building has disfigured a shopping street as a memorial to real estate megalomania. But Benko's former press spokesman is apparently still enjoying the fact that he once managed to place several pages of advertisements in the "Krone" newspaper in 2021 to beat the clumsy advertising drum for a disaster project.
This example shows that even opponents cannot ignore the "Krone", which is solely committed to its readers. Their presence in Austria's largest daily newspaper by far is also important to them.
In the fall of 2022, Benko's Signa retail division spared no expense or effort to officially launch the luxury department store project with a lavish celebration in the Museumsquartier.
It was given the name "Lamarr". An international supermodel was hired to host the event. The well-known Toni Garrn was hired for photos with Benko and other top Signa managers, who, according to Krone research, was charged a total of 48,000 euros for the appearance in Vienna via a Parisian agency.
The invoice recipient: Benko's press officer at the time.
Today, retail experts believe that the gray concrete structure could only be torn down because it was wrongly designed.
Today, the green district leader Markus Reiter, once an advocate of the Signa concrete sealing in Vienna-Neubau, would do well to encourage the city's top officials to buy the site in order to grind down the shell.
Today, surveys show that a Hedy Lamarr Park would trigger a wave of enthusiasm among the Viennese.
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