Door Number 3 Launches Blog to Share Marketer's Perspective of SXSW Music/Film/Interactive Conference
By Bryan Keplesky, Art Director, Door Number 3

It's coming up on mid-March in Austin, Texas. If you live here, that can only mean one thing: time to start working on your taxes. Oh, and getting ready for that little festival called South By Southwest. For those that love acronyms or text messaging, it's simply SXSW.

During SXSW, Austin transforms into a completely different city. Actually, I'd go a bit further and say that Austin becomes a parallel universe. A universe where watching hundreds of bands or movies, drinking free beer at 11 a.m. or seeing Dan Rather hanging out in a frat bar on 6th Street are normal activities. Austin plays host to thousands of people (some of them very odd) from all over the country and even the world.

But Austin also hosts thousands upon thousands of advertising messages. The first half of the festival, SXSW Interactive and Film, does a great job this year by providing panels exploring different forms of advertising, particularly with new and experimental media, brand building and marketing. Following the Interactive and Film festivals, the music festival puts all the theory and lecturing to practice. This is when the real advertising blitz begins, right on the downtown streets.

This got me thinking that anyone with any affiliation to the advertising industry, whether in Austin or not, would probably be interested in what goes on here during SXSW. A manic energy forms here, and really it comes down to most people being part of something (a hot new band, a hot new energy drink) and wanting to get as many people to know about it as possible.

So with this curiosity in mind, a few of the staff members from Door Number 3, including Prentice Howe, Creative Director, Mary Katherine Heath, Director of Media, and myself, are venturing into the SXSW storm and blogging about the whole festival. We're calling it "Behind The Door: SXSW 2007." We are digging into all the lectures, panels, filmsand events that we believe have relevance to the world we work in everyday. This means cranking out multiple daily updates, with reports and analyses of the lecturepanels and films, posting photographs, and providing opinions on the marketing stunts that work and the ones that fall flat. I won't even spare myself - with some friends, I publish a 'zine (I fondly think of it as a "rag") in town called Misprint, and we're doing our part to get noticed, too. This is what's great about SXSW - everyone gets a fair shot - from big companies with big budgets all the way down to a random person with a good idea. It's all playing out from March 9-18, and Door Number 3 is happily in the thick of it.