yeah, yeah, enough about the beastie boys and their copyright software. i'm just glad that matteo pericoli's book "manhattan unfurled" is getting some additioal exposure as their cover art. i bought the book a couple of years ago and bought a couple of copies for NYC friends as well. i love that mr. pericoli's website has a java applet that will scroll through the drawing, so you can see new york's skyline (circa 2001) in the beautiful style of his 22-foot long drawings in a daughter window on your desktop. check it out by clicking here. it's mesmerizing, isn't it?

does anybody else want to see the movie control room? 'cause i want to see it and i'll be surprised if steve is as anxious to as i am. we agree on pretty much everything in life (which is really damn lucky) but movies sometimes are difficult. he rented the original russian version of solaris from netflix and tried to get me to watch it this weekend, but i prety much fell asleep on the couch. maybe if we'd watched the more recent george clooney version i could have been entranced enough by him to stay awake.

i know i haven't complained about work much lately, and that's a good thing since i don't think it's just been because i haven't blogged as much: i have truly been much happier lately. my group is now fully staffed and we're getting caught up. however, now that we're starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, a new issue has emerged: everyone is the boss of us.
it's very unfortunate, but completely commmon, for online media to inhabit a confusing space between traditional media and web development. and in the ad agency world that means everyone, from the creative folks who design the websites and ad banners, to the "traditional" media planners, wants to be involved. and that's really and truly a good thing since it can create a heck of a lot of good brainpower. however, it's tough because it can really get sticky when everyone feels that not only should they be informed and involved, but they should be involved from the beginning and they should have veto/approval power.
i think this is coming up more now since we're getting caught up and we're very excited and we're trying to FYI everyone about what's going on. however, instead of the result being "awesome! thanks for sharing this -- here's something i'm working on and how it might affect this" the result is that everyone (at all levels) is coming back with "we need to be involved sooner" and "we need to be able to approve this" and "is this really the right idea for this?" (said in that tone that implies it may not be). and that's really hard. we're getting it from all sides: we've received comments and feedback from both external partner companies (a couple of whom we are constantly pulling teeth at to get the information we need) and internal folks, who constantly want to know more about what we're doing, but don't remember to cc' us on what they're doing or invite us to meetings.
i know everyone is well meaning deep down, and that they don't realize that this is a problem, so i don't really know what to do. i think it's one of those situations where i have to point out that we really *do* want thoughts and feedback, but they also should recognize that we are bringing our wealth of experience and a ton of time to each of our projects (which is sometimes why the results are not ready with much time to spare), which is why we should be given some common courtesy and the benefit of the doubt.
one coworker last week really was awesome about sharing her feedback. she said "i know you guys are realy behind and i appreciate you hunting me down and sharing this with me at the last minute. i also realize you're the experts, so can you explain this to me?" it was great. and it really put into perspective all of the other comments lately that were more along the lines of "why aren't we seeing your work earlier in the process? why in the heck are you doing this?"
i think this a huge issue because it's starting to affect morale. the goal would be for my hard-working team to feel like their work is respected and to feel like part of the team, but based on what they've told me lately, they're feeling more like they're beholden to everybody and that they're not part of a team where everyone else feels equally beholden.
we had this exact problem way back when i was at JWT in 2000 (i'm going to generalize here: we certainly didn't have this problem with all of our coworkers). our creative folks wanted to be have more of a say on which media partners we worked with since the partner sites were their creative canvases. our traditional media folks were either resentful because they weren't planning digital, or were too busy to meet with our vendors but wanted to have a say in what properties we picked. and the account people get so much more than they are with traditional media because the creative is so much more custom and labor-intensive that they start to have thoughts on what media properties we're using and how, even though they would never consider saying "we should be buying shape magazine instead of self".
so what do i do? i want our group to fit in and be loved by all of our partner teams, but i also want us to be respected instead of questioned from every corner. i've talked to a couple of co-workers on other accounts and they said they haven't had this problem. ugh. so i guess i'm lucky. maybe my boss will have some ideas...