"This would be funded via ad revenue (companies like Coinbase for example could pay to be advertised) and the main purpose would be to increase exposure of bitcoin to the community."
If I were at a mall, and knew nothing about BTC, and saw a Kiosk promoting it, but could not find a single store within the mall that accepted BTC, then that would speak to me moreso than the kiosk.
For this to work, I daresay that you would need to arrange for a lecture and then invite all the business owners from the stores in the Mall and sell them on Bitcoin and encourage them to accept Bitcoin currency by showing them the tons of merchants throughout the world that already do. THEN, you give the Kiosk power and rather than have sites like coinbase sponsor it, let the shops accepting Bitcoin promote themselves at the Kiosk.
That's my 2 cents. (I just realized how literal this saying can be now lol)
Yeah, this was to a degree part of the conversation too. Tough part of this is that there are A LOT of big corporate stores in the mall (a few local stores too) and it's not like we can just ask the employees from Macy's to come learn about it or the employees from Under Armour.
However, there are already a handful of stores that do accept bitcoin in the mall (Victoria Secret, Starbucks, some lesser known brands) and part of the idea too was if we could get businesses on board do a "bitcoin Friday" kind of thing where on Friday there are incentives for customers to use bitcoin (say 2% off)