On September 23 I launched Door No. 2, a new agency that combines the traditional focus of my work with a new media sensibility. The short answer as to why I decided to start this company is simple enough: over the last four years, every single major project I have been involved in has included a significant web component.  On many of these projects, I have collaborated with the great people at Fastspot. We’ve enjoyed these collaborations and we feel that the work as well as the experience we have offered our clients is of high quality. Under those circumstances, it made sense to pool our efforts and create a new company focused specifically on projects for educational institutions with a strong interactive component. Thus Door No.2 was born.

That’s the short answer. Here is the long one . . .

Right now there’s a war going on between new media prophets and traditional marketers. The marketers continue to adhere to the old paradigms. They view the Internet as a new technology that requires them to adapt their practices to new forms of delivery but does not require reevaluation of their core principles. On the other side are new media prophets. These prophets claim that the rise of the Internet leads to an entirely different communications environment, one in which traditional forms of marketing are ineffective and need to be replaced by approaches that are more transparent, honest and based on dialogue rather than on one-way communication. The new media prophets believe that we are seeing the end of marketing as we know it today.

While my sympathies are with the new media prophets, the skeptical side of me sees their claims as too idealistic. I do not believe, as some claim, that we can possibly return to a halcyon time before the advent of marketing when we selected goods and services based on genuine need and were not influenced by the tools of image projection. The large corporations are too powerful and savvy to let the world that they have built through image projection fade away.

In any event, the long answer as to why I started Door No.2 is because I wanted to fully engage these issues not just on the level of theory but also on the level of practice. Tracey Halvorsen of Fastspot is an articulate and thoughtful spokesperson for the new media sensibility. By collaborating with her and the entire Fastspot team, I learn an enormous amount about new media values and create opportunities to participate in putting new media values into action.

The domain of our work is the one I have always chosen for myself – colleges, universities and schools. The basic question remains the same as always: how do you use the tools of marketing to advance something as value laden and important as education? The tools are changing. Door No.2 provides an avenue for exploring the changing communications environment at the dawn of the 21st century.