Why a Florida company is designing the Pure Michigan website

Sarasota, Fla.-based Miles Media LLP won a contract to redesign Michigan.org, the state's travel website, and improve content and navigation.

LANSING — The Florida-based company that won a contract to redesign Michigan’s tourism website beat out competing firms, including some based in Michigan, that have worked on other Michigan government websites.

Miles Media LLP’s contract, worth $389,690, was neither the highest nor the lowest bid out of 22 firms vying for the work. The field included 12 companies based in the state, including a sister agency to the firm that currently produces Pure Michigan commercials and another that redesigned the state’s official website.

Crain’s and Bridge Magazine requested contracts and price information from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. through the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The MEDC previously did not disclose the bid amounts.

State tourism leaders said decisions on hiring a vendor are not made based on price alone, but also value — including the level of detail in a company’s proposal and its ability to demonstrate in writing alone that it can do the work requested.

“Nobody should ever think that just because we didn’t choose one of them that our companies can’t do the work,” Dave Lorenz, vice president of Travel Michigan, which manages the state’s tourism efforts, said of Michigan-based firms.

“I will always give more weight to a local company. That’s me, and I’m sure that’s most of our people,” Lorenz said. “But at the end of the day, we have this responsibility to provide the best product possible.”

The selection last month of Sarasota, Fla.-based Miles Media to redesign Michigan.org, the state’s official travel site, raised eyebrows on social media for the apparent irony of choosing an out-of-state company to work on a Pure Michigan branding project.

Travel Michigan wants to update the state tourism website to solve issues related to navigation and content. The project should take 28 weeks to design and build the site; when finished, it will include a new hosting platform and operating system and more user engagement tools, such as trip planning and integrated social media.

Each company that bid estimated price differently, with some including options for additional services or recurring site maintenance, so the bids can’t easily be compared with one another.

Yet price proposals released by the MEDC show a few companies’ bids topped $1 million — though some were multi-year offers:

• Dearborn-based Campbell Marketing and Communications bid $1.1 million in the first year and more than $341,000 for each of the second and third years.
• Pleasant Ridge-based Pitch Black Media LLC proposed $2.8 million over three years.
• Chicago-based Rightpoint Consulting LLC, which has a Novi office, proposed a range from $1.04 million to $1.26 million over three years.

A few companies bid less than $100,000, including:

• Detroit-based Novocan LLC ($57,000 plus recurring monthly fees for maintenance)
• Baltimore-based Simple Information Inc. ($44,175 plus additional costs for hosting and project management)
• Troy-based Integrated Productivity Systems LLC dba IPS Technology Services ($39,500 plus an additional $1,500 monthly fee for web hosting).

Travel Michigan awards contracts using an evaluation committee. In this case, it consisted of marketing staff and industry professionals, Lorenz said, adding that the committee narrowed the field and opened price proposals only from the finalists.

Royal Oak-based Octane Design and Tucson, Ariz.-based Simpleview LLC were the two other finalists on the website project, a Travel Michigan spokeswoman said. Octane bid $260,000, with additional fees for site maintenance. Simpleview bid $738,000 in the first year and $362,000 in recurring costs.

“We are a quasi-governmental organization. There are always going to be pressures put on an organization like ours from constituents (and) others who want us to make a decision because they have friends in the industry,” Lorenz said.

“The reason we go through this process is so that people can’t say down the road, ‘Oh, you picked them because they’re your friends.’”

The contracts show Miles Media was selected over companies that have worked on state projects before. They include the Birmingham office of MRM/McCann, whose sister advertising firm, McCann Erickson, is the agency of record for Travel Michigan and produces Pure Michigan commercials; and Lansing-based Gravity Works Design LLC, which helped redesign Michigan.gov, the state’s official government website.

Miles’s contract includes four annual renewal options worth $141,240 each year for site hosting and maintenance.

Miles works solely with travel marketing and branding and counts state, regional, national and international visitors bureaus and travel agencies as clients.

The company employs about 200 people and has more than $50 million in annual net revenue, with 10 percent growth forecast in the next year, said Doug Luciani, Miles’s vice president of communications and branding.

The firm will hire Brighton-based digital marketing agency TwoSix Digital as a subcontractor. Both companies said the value of the TwoSix subcontract has not yet been decided.