Vision, mission and values

AlterMedia is a design, research and technology company serving the marketing industry. We offer our clients marketing research to increase their sales at the least cost, along with the means to implement these strategies: graphic design and printing, website planning and implementation, and custom database development. We primarily seek relationships with larger agencies on a wholesale "broker-protected" basis. Retail sales play a more limited role, but we are always interested in considering direct end-client opportunities.

Founded in 1993, AlterMedia was created and continues to be owned by Ted Dyment. Ted became a professional graphic designer in 1984 when he co-founded his first graphic design firm. With over a quarter century of experience, beginning prior to the so-called "desktop publishing revolution", Ted has expanded AlterMedia's focus into market research and the sort of number-crunching that only databases can accomplish. Long before the world began hearing about "web analytics" and "SEO services", Ted was boosting client sales with similar techniques applied to data-mining and competitive intelligence gathering. He believes that the world is filled with beautiful graphic design, yet much of it has utterly failed to "move product": selling pretty designs that are not built upon market research is a disservice to clients.

Just as AlterMedia creates innovative design and services for our clients, we also seek innovative internal and external relationships. These relationships are to be based on the following principles:

  • We support the development of local creative arts and programming specialists. While many of our best suppliers are national and international, AlterMedia also seeks to pursue a "buy local" policy wherever possible. Our offices are located in a strong rural arts community, and we seek to make it stronger.
  • We believe that genuinely elegant design and technical solutions are best developed in an unorthodox and playful working environment. As a result, we support structures producing quality and efficiency within a collaborative environment, rather than systems geared for top-down control.
  • We believe that management and designers play an important role in our products and services, but we also seek to properly recognize the role of the technologists and engineers whose creativity powers the invisible heart of many projects.
  • We believe that democratic decision-making is fundamental to any healthy community both inside and outside of a workplace.
  • We hold that AlterMedia staff shall be individually responsible for anticipating (and acting to mitigate) the effect of our company's ecological footprint in the natural world. Similar efforts must be made to address "social ecology" issues, such as environmental influences that are felt to be discriminatory on the basis of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, spiritual path, wealth, age, disability, or any other social pollution for which there is no rational excuse.
  • We demonstrate our responsibility toward our community and our planet by partnering with socially progressive organizations on a pro bono or subsidized basis.