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AEDC Opens Bids for Advertising Contracts

3 min read

After 21 years of contracting exclusively with Stone Ward, the Arkansas Economic Development Commission has opened bidding for its advertising, marketing and public relations work, which is worth up to $1.6 million annually.

The commission is splitting a single contract into three, with the goal of soliciting deeper experience in digital marketing and other specific branding, according to Jeff Moore, director of marketing and communications for the AEDC, the agency that works to attract businesses to locate or expand in Arkansas.

“There’s a branding and multichannel contract, a digital marketing contract and a public relations contract,” Moore said, adding that his agency felt a need for “more bandwidth within advertising agencies within those specialty areas. There can be a scenario that this would be a good fit for one advertising agency that might be able to do all those things very well, but it also may be three separate agencies handling disparate contracts.”

The contract is open for bidding every seven years. Notifications went out April 27 and bidding will close on May 27, said Moore, who described the initial “request for qualifications” that went out to advertising agencies represented a “pass-fail sort of situation,” specifying minimum qualifications that agencies must meet. Once agencies have qualified, a committee will evaluate their bids, and the highest-scoring firms will be approached for negotiations. Moore emphasized that the bid is open to all advertising agencies.

The contracts will be awarded July 1, 2016, the beginning of the 2017 fiscal year.

“The marketing world is changing very quickly, and it’s becoming more digital and data-driven,” Moore said, saying the AEDC hopes to maximize “inbound” marketing efforts, which focus attracting traffic to the agency’s website. 

In the AEDC’s case, Moore said, that would translate into a company that expands or relocates in Arkansas. The further goal would be for these companies to become what Moore called “brand promoters,” which tell other companies the benefits of doing business in the state. “They might emphasize the good things about Arkansas – quality of life, central location, and how easy it is to do business here.”

Moore called all of that “the inbound process.”

The AEDC’s advertising budget for the past 20 years has been $1.1 million, Moore said, but the governor has requested that the state legislature increase that amount by $500,000 a year.

Moore said the agency has been pleased with Stone Ward’s work, and that the timing of the bids wasn’t performance related, but rather a matter of state law. “Once you have expunged your yearly contract extensions you have to go out and get bids,” he said. “But we wanted new things as well.”

One goal for the digital contract, Moore said, is to go beyond “capturing” users of the AEDC web site. “Once you have their contact information, you can go off to data providers and you can buy third-party data. It’s called anonymized data because it’s void of names, addresses and proprietary information. You’re buying knowledge about their behavior on the web. Then you overlay that data on top of what you have in your CRM, so when you buy advertizing in the digital space, you start with more information than you had in the past. Before, you had to kind of waste money and learn, but now this marketing intelligence helps you understand your target, where they’re spending their time online, and it allows you to be more efficient and responsible with your dollars.”

“We’ve certainly been pleased with our relationship with Stone Ward as a full-service advertising agency,” Moore said. “Our hope is that more and more people will hear about it [the new contracts] and everybody will have an opportunity to bid.”

Millie Ward, president of Stone Ward, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the firm will bid for the contract again, but said she could not comment on the bidding process under the rules of the contract.

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