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I like this.

Victory's Mass-Media Message

By Connie Gore

DALLAS-With more than advertising revenue at stake, Ross Perot Jr. is betting on the best-of-the-breed of high-definition LED to spread the word near and far that Victory Plaza is Dallas' place to be.

"The investment in the technology will be as much as the buildings themselves," Jonas Woods, president of Hillwood Capital, tells GSR. The pair of four-story, mixed-use buildings flanking the street in front of American Airlines Center will sport 10 LED panels, with more pizzazz than the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square, he says, and an advanced directional sound system with invisible zones so continuous-feed messages ring loud and clear.

Victory Media Network, the name for now, will be the gatekeeper for the LED kingdom and whatever else evolves from the play. "Unlike Times Square, where the LED signs are controlled by disparate groups, this will be controlled by one group," Woods says. "We will have the ability to create really dynamic messages and impressions...and to dominate the message to the consumer."

The subliminal message is every tourist will remember the LED scene and be sure to spread the word to others as a must-see attraction before making a trip to the "Big D." Not even Tokyo's building advertisements can match what will become Victory Plaza's beacon. "We want them to say 'you've got to go to Victory to see the LED panels,'" he says. "It's unparalleled in this country and there's nothing else like it in the world."

The West and East Plaza Buildings, spaced about 125 feet apart, each will have four 15-feet-high by 25-feet-wide LED panels, horizontally positioned side by side. A tower on the West Plaza Building will be topped off with a fifth panel, 30-feet high by 20-feet wide, while the East Plaza gets a 20-feet-high by 30-feet-wide board on the structure's southeast corner. Inside the buildings will be a high-brow mix of restaurants, nightclubs, bars and even some office space.

Advertisers can rent one board, multiples or the whole shebang. Air time contracts can be one minute or several years. To sweeten the prospects, LED panels can be butted to create a 50-foot-wide streaming ad in a Hollywood-style production with a Madison Avenue avant-garde stamp.

Woods says the high-tech, hard-sell LED story board is the outgrowth of advertising sales for American Airlines Center. "We had a really good experience when we were selling the advertising at that building," he says. "We felt this (Victory Plaza) was an opportunity to do a Times Square feel."

American Airlines Center's panel sponsors are Dr Pepper, UPS, Ford Motor Co. and naturally the airlines and sports teams. Woods says talks have begun for the new venue--a deal could be inked in the coming months. "It doesn't do us a lot of good to sell that space too early," he says. "It doesn't need to be pre-leased...like office or retail." He's not saying too much about who's doing the talking, but did acknowledge another vehicle manufacturer is interested in Victory Plaza's primetime placement. "Every imaginable consumer product company is a prime candidate for this kind of inventory," he says.

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More Victory information. What a great vision.

DALLAS-In a bid to make Victory the Times Square of the West, Hillwood in coming weeks will break ground on a 26-story, mixed-use tower, the first in a series of new builds rolling out through year's end. The "coming soon" news includes a 30,000-sf grocery store in yet another building to be unveiled right down the street.

Ross Perot Jr.'s vision for Victory is the coveted 24-hour destination that's eluded Dallas on its road to cosmopolitan status. "More than anything, we're trying to create a dramatic place," says Jonas Woods, president of Hillwood Capital. Along with the real estate, the Hillwood-owned components will include a security force in adjunct with the Dallas Police Department, a development-wide concierge service for Perot's "city within a city," a media hub and a light-rail station, set to open this month and linking Victory, anchored by American Airlines Center, to the rest of the city.

"There will be nothing else like it short of Times Square," David Hicks, senior vice president of office development for Hillwood, tells GlobeSt.com about the second phase of Victory's construction, timed to deliver in third quarter 2006--in sync with the 32-story W Hotel & Residences, which in a few weeks will commence construction of a second residential tower with another 60 condos.

The Victory fast-track is making it difficult to keep up with the birthing of a bustling urban center designed not to detract from Downtown Dallas, but "to give our corporate city a tool to recruit the best and brightest," Hicks says. Retail and residential are simultaneously rising rather than building rooftops and adding shopping space on the tail end in the march toward build-out of a 72-acre legacy, once a brownfield site on the CBD's edge and now being marketed as Uptown.

To help speed development, Hillwood also recruited San Diego-based Fairfield Residential Inc. for a pair of eight-story, residential and retail towers and will be announcing "another notable multifamily developer" for the 26-story apartment building. "In the next 90 days, there will be eight cranes on the Dallas skyline in Victory," says Hicks, a recent speaker at the monthly meeting of the apartment income brokers network jointly sponsored by Fidelity National Title and La Jolla Bank.

The most closely watched component in Victory's second phase is the class AA office space. Hicks has spent most of this year courting Downtown and Uptown office tenants to snag a deal to jumpstart construction.

"We're trying to gauge the market," Perot told last week's RealShare Dallas audience. "We're still waiting for high-end anchor tenants. As soon as we get that, we'll break ground."

Victory is entitled for 10 million sf of development, of which four million sf will be office construction. Hicks' chief assignment is getting a lead tenant for a 36-story building, possibly higher, with a seven-level parking component and a 120-unit residential top in the $500-per-sf range. The structure, with 350,000 sf of office space and 100,000 sf of retail, will be the first new office in the Downtown area in two decades, according to Hicks.

And, the green-building office design "will be the first multi-tenant office buildings to rise in the US and will feature 18-inch raised floors for power, data, voice and air delivery," Hicks says. "The rental rates will be higher, but you'll have lower energy costs. It's the way to build right now. The long-term savings are there."

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This looks awesome.  But you have to wonder how the CBD will fare.  They already have some of the highest office vacancies in the country now.  I wish they could incorporate it more with downtown.

I'm too lazy to read the articles, but isn't it more in the residential are of Uptown Dallas. This is Victory Plaza, and I am guessing it has to do with Victory Dallas, which is more of Uptown Dallas.

Here are some projects, which are mostly residential which means there should be some kind of street life going on.

Victory Residences (Notice all the sidewalk retail. Houston can learn a thing or two from this.

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One Victory Tower

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Victory Commons

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The W

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So, basically, it's advertising on a large scale format. Sort of like what we have to sit through at the movie theatres? This is supposed to be an "attraction"?

Oh come on. Yes it will be an attraction. Just like Shibuya in Tokyo or Times Square in NYC. Just on a smaller scale. I wish Houston had something like this. I would be the first to move in with all this development, and it looks like a very cool area to live in. Los Angeles will be building something similar in their downtown.

LA Live

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These things seem to go in cycles. 100 years ago, people painted advertising directly on buildings. Eventually, people thought it was tacky, and the practice was discontinued. The flaking signs were long thought to be eyesores. Now, cities take pride in these remnants of the past (e.g., the Sam Houston Hotel).

Same thing with neon; it was very fashionable from the 20's until the mid-fifties, and then abruptly fell out of favor. In the 60's 'neon' was practically a synonym for sleazy. In recent years it has experienced a revival and appreciation.

These supersigns dazzle us now with their sheer scale and novel effects; but I wonder if in a few years they too will suffer from overexposure. The reason Times Square, Las Vegas and Tokyo are tourist attractions is because tourists can't see these things at home. Once every city has 'em, they'll be old hat. I also wonder if changing technology will pose a problem in maintaining these signs. For a while, it appeared that creating/repairing neon signs was a dying art.

Part of the reason the supersigns were such an improvement in Times Square is because the facades they cover were in such poor condition. Would Victory Plaza have enough substance to make an architectural statement if the signs were eventually removed?

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I agree, I don't see how huge advertisements projected on the side of a building is an attraction. How is this any different from all the billboards Houston has along our roadways, that are so vilified on this forum?

Also, in this picture:

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I don't care for the way the buildings cover up the sides of the American Airlines building. They seem to be too close in together... The AA is a nice looking building that should stand out more prominently than that, IMO...

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Speaking of thinking they are "the Manhattan of the Southwest", check THIS out. (I rest my case)

DALLAS'S 80-FOOT ULE TREE TO RIVAL ROCKEFELLER'S

09:21 PM CST on Wednesday, November 10, 2004

By KATIE MENZER / The Dallas Morning News

Dallas can't top the grandeur and tradition of Rockefeller Center's tree-lighting celebration, but if bigger is better, let the bragging begin.

The city of Dallas' largest holiday tree

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On a serious note, I do not think it was Dallas' intention to make this like a times square. Houston is guilty for stealing ideas from other cities also. From the Central Park in downtown, the one day to become Manhattan village by the water wall, the Manhattan style brownstones going up in downtown, the French Quarter condos by Memorial, to the Venetian design strip mall near the Woodlands(which I passed by this weekend, and it looked absolutely awful). Honestly, I think some of these reactions would be totally opposite if this project was going up in Houston. I used a little euphemism in that last sentence, but you all should now what I am talking about.

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On a serious note, I do not think it was Dallas' intention to make this like a times square.  Houston is guilty for stealing ideas from other cities also.  From the Central Park in downtown, the one day to become Manhattan village by the water wall, the Manhattan style brownstones going up in downtown, the French Quarter condos by Memorial, to the Venetian design strip mall near the Woodlands(which I passed by this weekend, and it looked absolutely awful).  Honestly, I think some of these reactions would be totally opposite if this project was going up in Houston.  I used a little euphemism in that last sentence, but you all should now what I am talking about.

"the Venetian design strip mall near the Woodlands(which I passed by this weekend, and it looked absolutely awful)."

I personally think its one of the most beautiful things to ever hit this town (as far as strip malls go)...

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Me, too, and I'd go there before I went to Sharpstown, West Oaks, or even Willowbrook Mall. It's not the Woodlands, that's clear, but it's not ugly, and viewing it on the human scale, by actually walking around in that area, you can much more appreciate it than zooming by at 70 mph on I-45. Give it a second chance.

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