The Gulfport Redevelopment Commission plans to hire a Baton Rouge firm to market The Mississippi Aquarium.
The Sun Herald of Gulfport, Mississippi, reports Carole Lynn Meadows, GRC chairwoman, says MESH Integrated Marketing and Advertising scored highest among six finalists.
“We tried to look at all the proposals fairly to see what the best fit was going to be for what we needed,” Meadows says. “When the dust settled, MESH was outstanding.”
MESH will be responsible for the marketing campaign to raise money for the $65 million aquarium, launch the project and, during the aquarium’s first year, work on funding to sustain it. The ambitious campus slated for downtown Gulfport across from Jones Park will incorporate the coastal environment and its marine life, from freshwater to saltwater. It is under design and is slated to open in early 2019.
Meadows says panelists were assigned numbers on the scorecards, so the proposals were anonymous. MESH, she says, was the “clear winner.”
The group fully integrated digital marketing into its campaign, including a mobile application aquarium visitors can use, a 3-D presentation with goggles and a prototype of the website MESH would build.
Representatives of MESH declined to comment to the Sun Herald on the firm’s selection because the contract has not yet been negotiated and signed. Meadows says she expects those negotiations will take place next week.
“The committee members went into it with a clean slate,” she says. “We were looking for that group that had the spark we needed for such an incredible project as this. It is not your normal project. We just needed that group that seemed to get it perhaps better than other groups got it. It was just a spark, an energy, and enthusiasm.”
Read the full story.
