If you read a lot of marketing advice these days, then you’ve seen the word “mobile” used as the key to the future – much the way “plastics” was in The Graduate. But for those businesses and brands that can’t quite grasp the mobile world, Jeanne Hopkins and Jamie Turner offer a good overview in Go Mobile: Location-Based Marketing, Apps, Mobile Optimized Ad Campaigns, 2D Codes and Other Mobile Strategies to Grow Your Business.

The title of the book gives away the dilemma most brands face: Planning and executing mobile marketing is itself as complicated and multi-faceted as anything we’ve ever seen. So Hopkins & Turner cover a lot of ground, starting with many successful Fortune 500 uses of mobile and a look at many current popular apps. Then, Go Mobile goes through all the tactics, including search, LBS, SMS, MMS, and others.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who Go Mobile is aimed at, since it’s both a broad and detailed at the same time. Anyone navigating mobile marketing at this scale ought to have some experienced help. But any marketer who simply needs a comprehensive course in the state of mobile marketing right now will find it useful. This is one of those books you ought to read soon, since it’s certainly going to be outdated this time next year.

Special thanks to Wiley to providing me with a review copy.

Regional media buys are often overlooked during Super Bowl advertising coverage. But not here. We leave few Super Bowl advertising stones unturned.

Portland’s office of StruckAxiom, combined forces with Secret Weapon Marketing, creative agency of record for Jack in the Box, to create a “Marry Bacon” campaign promoting their new BLT Cheeseburger Combo.

The TV spot breaks on Super Bowl Sunday in approximately 20 western and southern states.

Nick Fletcher, DVP of Marketing Communications for Jack in the Box, says, “We know our audience is digitally focused, and we wanted to create online engagements that amplify our traditional strategies.”

“The Jack in the Box brand is the perfect platform for snack-sized, entertaining and shareable content,” adds Matt Anderson, creative director at StruckAxiom.

Susan Krashinsky, Marketing Reporter for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, reports that this Sunday’s menu of adverts won’t be on air north of the U.S. border.

The prevailing notion is that the game just does not have the cultural resonance here that it does in the United States. And yet, the Super Bowl was the third most-watched television program in Canada in all of 2011 – only the Stanley Cup Finals were bigger – drawing 6.53 million viewers, according to BBM Canada. Why not take advantage of those numbers?

Krashinsky points out that marketers could buy their way into Canadian living rooms for a song. NBC is charging $3.5-million (U.S.) to run a 30-second commercial during the big game, according to reports. By contrast, sources here say a 30-second spot on CTV runs closer to $130,000 (Canadian).

Krashinsky also explains that talent fees are country-specific, so a Canadian marketer would be faced with paying extra fees. That could mount up quickly in Super Bowl Sunday, with celebs like Elton John, Flavor Flav and many others appearing in ads and collecting fat paychecks.

This Pepsi ad, for instance, will not be shown in Canada:

David&Goliath and Siltanen & Partners in El Segundo; Saatchi & Saatchi in Torrance; Team One in El Segundo; RPA in Santa Monica; and Innocean in Huntington Beach. All have been toiling away on Super Bowl commercials for their clients.

Meg James of Los Angeles Times notes that 20 of this Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials, including those for Hollywood films, were made in Los Angeles.

“We look at this as the ultimate showdown with other advertisers and other agencies,” said Michael Sheldon, chief executive of Deutsch LA, which handles advertising for Volkswagen. “This is a creative arms war.”

“We have the best editors, the best music houses and directors. Over time I think you’ll see Los Angeles become the epicenter for advertising, “Rob Siltanen said.

Los Angeles has experienced a shooting spree as local agencies have expanded and new ones have opened. Together, local agencies make for an estimated $4-billion annual industry.

Special thanks to Justin Bajan from David&Goliath in LA for providing AdPulp readers with this special inside look at the making of KIA’s “Dreams” Super Bowl spot.

It all started with a dream. Sort of.

I was sitting with my composition book in hand staring out of the window watching planes land at LAX when I blurted out to my partner, Dan Madsen, “Hey, what if we did something with dreams?” Little did I know that a random question like that would turn into months and months of writing, crafting, presenting, killing, changing, selling, licensing, bidding, re-thinking, shooting, editing, mixing, coloring and visual…effecting.

Dan and I were one of many teams working on this year’s Super Bowl commercial for Kia at David & Goliath. We competed against lots of amazing creatives and ended up working nights, weekends and everything in between, as we hoped to crack the winning idea.

After we got our concepts into some kind of digestible state, we presented them to our boss, ECD, Colin Jeffery. He smiled at this spot in particular— a good sign, and instantly saw what we were trying to do. He told us our concept would get to live in the Super Bowl war room—a conference room with bulletin boards filled with tons of amazing ideas.

So we boarded our precious baby up and hoped it would outlast the thousands of ideas the rest of the agency came up with. We watched it sit safely on a wall in the Super Bowl war room as countless other campaigns were posted and ripped down all around it.

Then on October 7th, something great happened. I turned 29. Well, that wasn’t that great, but what was great—our spot sold. We couldn’t believe it. Dan and I were in shock—we ran out of the office in joy like a scene from Jerry McGuire. Oh, and then I had my first child, Lydia, two days after. Cameron Crowe, eat your heart out.

After a week of paternity, we were back at it, talking to Noam Murro and other A-listers, then awarding Noam the job. Awesome guy on the phone. Equally awesome guy in real life. He really upped my Yiddish game.

Then we tried to secure the celebs and get the jokes we wrote into our spot. Dan had used a picture of Adriana Lima for his comp and boom: she agrees to appear in the spot. We had a fighting scene with Chuck Liddell in it—and eventually Mr. Liddell signed on. Colin, our owner/CCO, David Angelo, and our producer, Paul Albanese, drive up to meet Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue and the world’s most notorious band is in it. We thought a cowboy riding a rhino would be funny. We thought dual lumberjacks sawing a 50 ft sub would be cool. We wanted the entire stadium filled with bikini girls. Then we read all of this as line items in an official document. Rad.

Cut to us on day one at the Speedway in Irwindale, CA. I park and get asked if I would like to meet Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx. Um, yes please. I walk into their trailer and find two of the most down-to-earth and normal people I’ve ever met. They mentioned how much they liked the spot while I marveled at their trailer.

A couple hours later, we’re shooting. It’s dark. It’s cold. Good thing we have literally tons of pyro to keep us warm. Motley Crue plays Kickstart My Heart for like 6 hours. Those guys are pros.

Day two was the meadow scene. Never have a horse, a deer, a rabbit and grass been that interesting before. Ever have a van drive you a mere 500 feet over and over again from craft services to the set? I can now say I have.

Day three and four were back at the racetrack. Dan and I watched a giant sub get trucked and forklifted around. We witnessed 200 bikini girls scream for hours in the stands, Chuck Liddell fake-fight a huge Eastern European dude, a guy pretend to catch a giant shark (RIP giant shark scene) and last, but nottttttttt least—Adriana Lima wave a huge flag back and forth for hours. I think there’s a video of this on Youtube somewhere. She was amazing. She had these assassin laser eyes that could steal your soul if you looked too closely. She was and is the real deal.

The last two days consisted of us shooting at Universal Studios. We were at Stage 27, where they shot scenes from Indiana Jones, Die Hard and Jurassic Park. Not bad. I got to see the tallest closet ever—20 feet tall. I got to learn what a motion control camera does. And I got to watch our Sandman actor, Ric Sabien, sacrifice his body for Dan and I’s silly idea.

All throughout production, I kept thinking of how crazy it was that Dan and I scribbled this idea into our notebooks and then all of a sudden, like 500 people helped bring it to life. And oh, did I mention this was Dan’s first spot? Ever? How’s he going to cope with reality after this?

So there you have it. If I wasn’t already 1000 words over a typical blog post, I could regale you with how Adriana wore the wrong bathing suit, but we loved it anyways, Chuck Liddell’s surprisingly minimalistic outfit while it was 35 degrees out and Noam Murro’s use of the Yiddish word schmekel.

The biggest thanks in the world goes to my wonderful wife, Becky, for putting up with endless all-nighters, all-dayers and for never complaining at all. I was treated way better than I deserved.

Shoutouts to Jim Haygood and his assistant Dylan at Union Editorial. Great guys. To Pip, Patrick, Rob, Marissa and the smoothie girl at Method—super accommodating people who laughed at 97% of my jokes. To 740 Sound, Lime, and Stefan at Company 3—I’ll miss your Michael Bay and JJ. Abrams’ stories.

This new GE spot touts American manufacturing, but treads lightly so as not to feel too jingoistic.

Obviously, GE is a global company. So what’s an American company to do these days about its heritage? How far will “Made in America” take a brand?

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen Apple take a few lumps in the press because of the working conditions at the Chinese factories that make their products. There have also been a few rumblings about GM’s decision to award its billion-dollar media buying business to a European-owned agency, a perceived slight after the automaker received U.S. government financing to help it bounce back from bankruptcy.

As in so many things American, our sentiments are riddled with contradictions. Many Americans say they prefer to buy American products but don’t put their wallets where their mouths are.

It’s the subject of my latest column on TalentZoo.com, which will be on the home page tomorrow.

And, since February marks the 10-year anniversary of my columns, you can get the Kindle version of my best-of book for just 99 cents this month.

Put a dog in it. It’s an age-old directive in Adlandia for a reason. People love dogs.

And dogs love to chase red cars…

You have just seen “The Dog Strikes Back,” a special 75-second extended version of VW’s 2012 Super Bowl commercial from Deutsch LA, in which the all-new 2012 Volkswagen Beetle inspires Bolt the dog to get in shape.

The 60 second version of the ad will run in the second quarter of Sunday’s game.

And if all that leaves you wanting more, here is more…

According to Ad Age, Heineken’s Tecate beer brand is moving U.S. advertising from Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners’ U.S. Hispanic unit Ramona to its longtime Mexican agency, Olabuenaga Chemistri.

The consolidation, which will save costs, means all Tecate and Tecate Light U.S. advertising — including digital — will be run from south of the border, an unusual arrangement for a brand sold in the U.S.

Under the new arrangement, the same Spanish-language ads will air in Mexico and the U.S. But Olabuenaga Chemistri will also create English language ads to air in several U.S. markets in the Southwest.

Here’s some recent creative from Ramona:

I don’t know anything about Olabuenaga Chemistri, but I hope they come up with something better than that.

Tecate is the fourth-largest U.S. import behind Corona Extra, Heineken and Modelo Especial, according to 2010 rankings from Beer Marketer’s Insights.

Microsoft is taking a page from Mitt Romney’s playbook and going on the attack. But in a very nice way.

Here’s a print ad the company is running in The Wall Street Journal and other national newspapers of note.

Let’s examine some copy from the ad: “To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve the quality of an advertising product. But, that effort needs to be balanced with continuing to meet the needs and interests of users. Every business finds it own balance and attracts users who share those priorities.”

Let me rephrase that: Google doesn’t care about your privacy concerns, and will sell your data to advertisers to continue make obscene profits, that we at Microsoft would like to once again see in our own paychecks, stock price, etc.

For a Gentile, Scott Carrier knows a lot about Mormons, having lived most of his 50-plus years in Salt Lake City. Carrier’s new book is titled Prisoner of Zion, which interestingly is something he’s perfectly willing (and happy) to be. The place does have a magnetic pull, no question about it.

His book of stories weaves tales of home with tales from Carrier’s adventures in war torn countries on the other side of the world. Both carry weight, but I particularly like his take on Utah and Mormon culture. I also think Carrier’s timing is good, as the closer Mitt Romney gets to the White House, the more people will want to know about the Latter Day Saints.

In “Inside the Momosphere” Carrier describes how when he was eight years old, his LDS friends told him about being baptized in the Mormon temple, and what it meant.

They told me they’d been baptized in the temple and now they were going to a different heaven than I was, unless I converted. They said there are three levels of heaven and they were going to the highest one, the Celestial Kingdom, but the best I could hope for was the second level, the Terrestrial Kingdom, which isn’t a bad place, just not the best place.

To reach the Celestial Kingdom is to become god-like yourself. So, you can see why Mormons have had, and continue to have, an adversarial relationship with people of other faiths. No one wants to be told their version of heaven, which they’re presently making great strides to reach, is second class.

And class is a campaign issue this year. Thanks to the wealth he has amassed, Romney’s life on earth is a bit finer than most Americans will ever know. But it doesn’t stop there, it’s not just about money. Because Romney is by all accounts, “a good Mormon,” he’s also headed for a better afterlife, one where he will achieve godliness, and I have to think that’s a problem, politically speaking.

–

At the end of the book, in a piece called, “Najibullah in America,” Carrier endeavors to describe the American-centric world view held by many Mormon students in his classes at Utah Valley University in Orem. For these students, there simply is no separation between church and state. No need.

Jesus Christ created the United States of America by raising up our founding fathers and guiding their hand in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Once protections for religious freedom were in place, Jesus directed Joseph Smith to found an entirely new religion, restoring the true gospel, and begin building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.

That’s right, the pilgrims were just laying the groundwork for the intergalactic super show to be orchestrated, like a radio program, from Temple Square. But more importantly, America is for Jesus. Literally. When He comes back, He’s coming back to the America. So, naturally we must protect America at all costs from infidels, and keep funding the military at insane levels, which is a plank in the Romney campaign.

I know a lot of Jack Mormons, people who’ve thrown off the faith. I also know some good Mormons. They’re good people and I don’t want to see the kind of misunderstandings that might occur in this election season around religion. For instance, some conservative Christians, notably Southern Baptists, won’t admit the Mormons into the Christian brotherhood. Yet, Mormons are “busy building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.”

It may seem unfair to bring a man’s religion in to the campaign, but one’s ideas are often shaped by one’s faith. Therefore, it’s not just fair game, it is an essential part of considering where the person is coming from. Romney was a Mormon missionary in France. He knocked on doors in a Catholic nation that loves wine and sex. He knows what rejection looks like, which is good.

He also believes he’s living a righteous life, but it’s hard to know for sure if he is or isn’t. Just this morning he said he really doesn’t care all that much about the poor. He meant he wants to appeal to the middle class, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out like he’s callous and out of touch. The thing I wonder about is if it’s not all his fault, because a sense of superiority appears to be baked right into his cosmology.

[UPDATE] Reciting verses from The Bible this morning, President Obama responded to Romney’s comments about the poor, without having to call out Romney by name. He’s also clearly saying to Romney’s team and to the nation that he, President Obama, will be the good Christian in this race, thank you very much.

I lit up this morning when reading an article in the pages of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

The article describes the inner workings of AllNovaScotia.com, a startup business journal in Canada’s largest Maritime Province that charges a healthy $360 a year for access to content. From what I can tell there is no free version.

AllNovaScotia has 5,950 subscribers, whose monthly dues generate 80 per cent of its revenue. Three people with different email addresses can share a $30 a month subscription, but they can’t pass the stories on to anyone else without some effort. The publication — produced by a staff of 14, 11 of them reporters — is locked down in Flash, making sharing usually a cumbersome ordeal of cobbling together screenshots. No sharing buttons here.

A focus on people and their wealth makes AllNovaScotia a different beast from typical business coverage that focuses on companies. People’s names are bolded in stories, frequently paired with their corporate compensation and the assessed value of their house. An almost-daily feature is Who’s Suing Whom.

Lots of things to consider here. Work your niche, and offer somewhat lurid content if you want people to covet it and pay for it (AllNoviaScotia is published by David Bentley, who co-founded a gossip publication called Frank Magazine in the 1980s).

The other thing is don’t hesitate to charge for content, once you’ve determined how best to serve your audience. “You can’t be in the content business and not get paid for it,” Bentley says. Emphasis on business.

All of which leads me think how we might modify AdPulp’s editorial product so it doesn’t compete with the trades or other ad blogs, but delivers the perfect mix of stories and images that ad pros will gladly pay for. Like photos of themselves sunning in Cannes and gossip about who is sleeping with whom back in Manhattan and Santa Monica. Plus, the dish on which creative directors are total assholes, and which producers are the most fun to party with on location.

Of course, there’s just one small problem with my plan. I won’t put out a pub just for money. Yet, there is clearly a way to offer the meaty substance that real journalists cook up and industry cocktail chatter in the same vehicle. Sounds like AllNoviaScotia has it figured out, and I imagine many other niche and regional publishers are about to discover the right approach, as well. Because “You can’t be in the content business and not get paid for it.”

At the end of 2006, I started doing yearly recaps of my travels. From 2006-08 I was traveling for work a lot, so the lists were rather lengthy. Since, migrating to Oregon in 2008 we’ve been keeping it much closer to home. In fact, in 2011 I flew to Boston and back and that’s it. All other travel was by car.

• Moclips, WA
• Brownsville, OR
• Enterprise, OR
• Walla Walla, WA
• Zigzag, OR
• Madison, NH
• Franklin, MA
• Boston, MA
• Government Camp, OR

Our Valentine’s Day trip to the Washington Coast was one rich with discovery. We found an old seaside lodge with a great restaurant in Moclips, which is basically the end of the road in west central Washington.

Additionally, we took our maiden voyage to Walla Walla in 2011. Walla Walla, as you may know, is Washington’s Napa Valley. We also found our way to the charming hamlets Enterprise and Joseph, Oregon in the NE corner of the state. It’s good to know these kind of “last best places” still exist.

Past Travels: 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006

My buddy DK was here in Portland for the holidays. While dining at Zeus Cafe, he suggested that we could collaborate on a novel based on our experiences touring with Grateful Dead in the 1980s and 1990s. I like the idea a lot, and think the addition of a writing partner for this project would be particularly beneficial, as it will require much memory jogging and just as much vivid imagination.

DK, for his part, has his collection of hand-assembled Road Logs available for inspection (no small thing, considering DK and Anina’s house burned down a number of years ago). I too have some primary source materials to help ground the story in place and time. I also have the beginnings of a story written out in decades old drafts. My protagonist, Cody Timberlake of Salt Lake City, is a fan of the band and a pot-dealing ski bum with an East Coast education and beautiful friends.

Where might we take this character and the story now? To make a great novel, we need to adhere to the classic arch of a story and develop the necessary tension (plot twists) that holds it all together, before resolving with either a heartbreaking or heartwarming scene at the end. Naturally, we want to draw on the many real experiences we had during this ten-plus year period. In fact, I’m eager to simply record many of my true stories so they don’t fade into nothingness. Already too many years have passed, and that’s no doubt already changing the way we remember things and how we will present them. However, from a literary perspective, I feel that the distance we now have from these events will help us immensely. DK and I are not Tom Wolfe. We weren’t there as observers. And a composite view pieced together from many accounts, versus us relying on just our personal narratives, will likely present a more accurate picture of the time, the people and events.

For fun (and to prime the pump), I’d like to share one true Grateful Dead story with you now…

Deadheads are notorious for packing hotel rooms to well beyond capacity. After all, eight people in a room–four on the beds and four on the floor–is the more affordable way to travel. Of course, these configurations don’t exactly favor the hotel, and every once in a while we’d run in to some problems with irate staff.

After a show in Oakland one fine night, me and six or so of my friends, walk from the Coliseum to the nearby Hampton Inn where we are staying. At the front door of the hotel we are confronted, as is every guest, with a barricade and two hotel employees charged with the task of letting just two people per room enter the premises. That we had already checked in, paid in advance, moved in to the room itself, had all our gear up there, etc. didn’t mean a thing to these security stiffs.

I say, “Let me get this right, we check in to your fleabag hotel, go out on the town for the night and now we face a martial law situation at the entrance to the hotel?”

“Two people per room,” repeats the stiff.

I whisper to my friends, “let’s go, they’re not stopping us.” I pass the barricade with its insulting sign-in list, and my friends follow my block to the elevator area in the lobby and up we go. No one follows us, we go about our evening like the semi-normal people we are. But this whole thing is under my skin now. I’m pissed now.

In the morning I wake up, take a shower, put on my best outfit and head down to the lobby. “I’d like to speak to the manager.” He comes to the front and asks what he can do for me. I ask if we can speak in private. He escorts me back to his office. I sit down and begin to question him on last night’s theatrics. He says, “You don’t understand these people.” Long pause. “It’s one thing after the next with these people. Did you know they wash their clothes in the hot tub?”

He doesn’t see me as one of them. I don’t say anything, I just shoot scorn daggers at him with my eyes. Now he sees me. Now he says, “Hold it, you’re one of them. Screw you! You are out of here.”

I pull a piece of flattened cardboard from my pocket. The table tent I brought with me from the room says if I am not 100% satisfied with my stay at Hampton Inn my stay is free. I tell the harried manager I am not even 10% satisfied, as I toss the chain’s cardboard promise onto his otherwise orderly desk.

He stands and so do I. We head head back to the public front desk area, where the manager counts out and returns all the cash we had given up for a four night stay.

“Now get out,” he tells me.

“Gladly.”

I go back upstairs and report to my friends on the happenings below. We quickly pack up after our free night and head down to street to the Oakland Airport Hilton, where the staff have all read Conrad Hilton’s book on hospitality, Be My Guest. It’s actually the start of a long and grateful relationship with this particular Hilton property and Hilton in general. On the other hand, I haven’t stayed in a Hampton Inn room since (even though Hilton acquired the chain in 1999).

The second season of IFC’s Portlandia airs this Friday. The show is much anticipated in Puddletown and beyond.

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen — the show’s stars — have been out “doing press” for the show. Thanks to the deeply sarcastic nature of the program and its willingness to skewer hipsters over an open fire, The New Yorker is biting. In a sweeping article by Margaret Talbot we learn about Brownstein’s childhood in the Seattle suburbs, how she rocked hard in Olympia’s riot-grrrl scene and how she eventually moved to Portland and tried her hand a day job in advertising.

Brownstein said working at Wieden + Kennedy proved alienating, because of the way “the work mimics art.” Ouch.

Another interesting reveal in The New Yorker piece is this bit on the so-not-Hollywood writer’s room:

For the second season, Bill Oakley, a former head writer for “The Simpsons” who had moved to Portland, has helped out on the show. He says, “I’ve spent a lot of time in writers’ rooms. They’re pressure cookers. In most cases, they’re heavily male. You work long hours and many of the people in them have a really negative view about themselves and life.” The “Portlandia” writers’ room, however, is collaborative and laid-back. Some meetings have been held in the loft of the director Gus Van Sant, who has become friendly with Brownstein. “Gus’s dog was wandering in and out,” Oakley says. “There was a microbrewery downstairs.”

Answer me this…where in Portland is there not a microbrewery downstairs?

[UPDATE] The dynamic duo appeared Thursday on “Fresh Air” with host Terry Gross on NPR. Listen in.

Author and consultant, Joseph Grenny, writing in Business Week, sees a future where we learn to manage our internet addictions with the help of technology.

Smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, GPS-enabled gadgets, and ubiquitous Internet access will continue to feed and exploit the natural human proclivity toward immediate gratification. In 2012, we’ll become more acutely aware of the degree to which our lives feel more virtual than real—and our relationships, pleasures, and aspirations seem shorter-term and shallower.

While some will try to stave off these effects by taking Luddite oaths to eschew technology, others will create solutions that help us make electronic tools our slaves, not masters. Offerings that allow us to shut off texting in moving cars (Text Zapper, for one) or voluntarily block our own impulsive access to IMs and Internet surfing (Freedom and Anti-Social, for example) signify our realization that we are behaving in ways we don’t like. As the gap between gratification and happiness gets larger, entrepreneurs will step in and provide solutions.

At lunch today, I was thinking there was a time not so long ago when we were fully present at lunch. Our phones wouldn’t ring because there was no phone. There was lunch and if one was alone, maybe a book or newspaper to pass the time. Not now. Even if no one calls, someone could call, text or IM and that possibility changes the mood in the room.

Personally, I think we need more than a suite of Apps to solve the growing distraction problem. Maybe daily meditation and a reorganization of one’s day into digital and non-digital segments. I know I am seeking a better balance this year. Without this balance, one can fall through the Web’s portal to another time and place, like Alice through the looking glass. Clearly, there’s much to be fascinated with in world within a world, but it’s not the real world and right now the real world needs some work. Don’t you think?

Portland Mayor Sam Adams is not running for re-election, but he is working hard to do the job Portlanders hired him to do.

For one, Adams wants Portland to be “the scrappiest small global city in the United States.” That means exports, among other things. “Even without a coherent regional strategy or partnership, Greater Portland ranks second in the nation in export value as a percentage of our economy,” says Adams.

Here’s a look at one Portland-based company actively participating in the global economy:

Portland Development Commission has loads of video segments on YouTube that help to paint the city’s business environment in a positive light.

Here’s one that showcases the city’s attractiveness to startups:

For more information on the progress being made on several important fronts, see these Progress Reports from the Mayor’s office.

Lawyer and Democratic state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici is competing against Republican business consultant Rob Cornilles for Oregon’s 1st Congressional district seat (vacated by sex scandal-ridden David Wu).

This is what Bonamici and Cornilles look like on TV, which is where most 1st district citizens voting in the Jan. 31 special election will see them:

The 1st district is considered the economic engine of Oregon, according to KATU. It includes downtown Portland and suburban Washington County where Nike and Intel hold fort. The district which stretches to the Pacific Coast is also home to much of Oregon wine country.

Are you suffering from Information Age blues? Drowning in data with no time or inclination to sort through it all? You are not alone.

“The issue nowadays is to some extent the need for good filters, pushing away information after centuries of seeking it,” writes Quentin Hardy, Deputy Tech Editor of The New York Times.

Hardy attended a lecture in Berkeley last week by Harvard’s David Weinberger. Weinberger’s new book, Too Big To Know grapples in part with the problem of too much information. Weinberger also believes that “the Web’s ever-changing structure of links undermines hierarchical analysis by allowing everyone to see and contribute different points of view.”

Since Aristotle, there has been at least lip service to the idea of teleology, a process of discovery that leads to greater and greater understanding. We have invested much of our society in making such a process better.

Now, he said, the model of a protean, ever-linked and ever-changing world is killing that. “The dream of the West has been that we will live together in knowledge, that there is One Knowledge. The Web is saying ‘Nice try,’” Mr. Weinberger said. By its very success we know that “the Internet as a medium is far more like the world we live in” and “the Web is closer to the phenomenological truth of our lives,” he said.

Weinberger responded to Hardy’s article with a post of his own. For one, he thinks the headline in the Times piece is misleading.

“I don’t think the Net is ruining everything, and I am (overall) thrilled to see how the Net is transforming knowledge.”

I shared Hardy’s writeup with my friend DK, who is a professor of philosophy. DK wrote back to say the writer “should have mentioned Nietzsche. This article focuses on epistemology–but there are also social issues involved.”

Detailing one such social issue, DK says it is “interesting to note how the students’ writing skills have plummeted in the last several years. They write in sentence fragments with no command of American English–like they’re sending text messages.”

Which goes to this increasingly difficult issue at the heart of the too much information problem: Who has time to think? When the volume of information is pumping at full throttle, and you are gaming on one large screen, while using a desktop, laptop, tablet and/or phone for other tasks, there’s no time to read or write and no time for measured reflection.

DK is right to be concerned about the deterioration of basic communication skills in his students. And I am right to be concerned that I read fewer books that I once did. Why am I reading fewer books? Because the time I once reserved for reading text on paper is now given over to reading, writing and rearranging text on the screen. Plenty of thought and care go in to these acts, but where is the long arching story that requires deep concentration for hours and days on end? Where is the place in our hectic lives for the literary equivalent of the long walk in the woods? The answer is it is all available — the short form eBooks on every topic under the sun and the long form classics.

I think what our media abundance calls for is a greater degree of media literacy and also some personal restraint. It takes a disciplined reader to tackle Heidegger, Joyce, Yeats, Faulkner and the like. The reader must work for the pay off, as instant gratification, to say nothing of the game layer, is nowhere to be found.

I was talking to a new friend the other day and she mentioned to me how she perceived another agency in town through the lens of the agency’s website. She felt that they had an inflated sense of themselves, largely based on the artsy portraits of staff that feature prominently.

I asked her what she saw in Bonehook.com and she said, “I see a straight forward approach.”

Maybe she was being nice, I don’t know. Let me ask you, what do you see here? Is it crystal clear what the offering is? Because it has to be crystal clear, for this site to be an effective part of the Bonehook brand strategy. For the record, the offering is two-fold: “we” build brands for small businesses and “I” write copy for agencies and brands.

According to Google Analytics, a fair bit of traffic to this site comes from Bonehook’s listing on Portland Creative List. From that listing a number of people inquire about jobs, which we do not presently offer. Bonehook is me (a copywriter/creative director/brand strategist) and the perfect mix of contractors for any given project. Or it’s just me, writing copy for you. You decide.

Portland Creative List also serves up unsolicited Requests for Proposals. And direct mail from printers, cold calls from various service providers, and so on. You hang a shingle, people knock on the door.

Last fall’s Adweek article about strange agency names — Bonehook’s first major earned media score — continues to deliver a number of curious clickers too. Gotta love evergreen content.

Wherever visitors migrate from, or soon bounce to, I hope they pause long enough to consider these offerings of text. Words. Copy. Content. I’m a writer and I like to put the product on display. I also have faith in the the form. By reading these words, you get to know me a bit better, and after a while you may come to trust me and my advise more.

In addition, I see Bonehook as a journey and and a journey is something to joyfully share. A lot of agencies are too busy or too scared to open up and showcase their process, or total lack of process, as the case may be. Instead, they rely on tightly packaged case studies, white papers and/or instructional pieces on the agency blog meant to showcase expertise. I understand the need for that kind of formality, but I also believe there’s a need to loosen up when it comes to one’s own narrative. Therefore, I’m making an effort to expose our practices here, our victories and our stumbles. I don’t know if I can make the mundane interesting, but that’s the goal.

Content marketing. Everyone wants some.

But David Spark of Spark Media Solutions cautions that few of the agencies busy peddling their “content marketing” expertise have the necessary chops to make that claim.

Yes, ad agencies and PR firms without a seasoned editorial staff can physically create media, but it’s like hiring a general practitioner when you need a specialist.

I’m sure I’ll get a lot of heat for this comment as many ad agencies and PR firms are basing a lot of their new business on content marketing. I’m all for that, just as long as they have an experienced staff to do it. That requires hiring people who have worked in traditional journalistic media, not just giving new responsibilities to staffers who don’t have the experience or training. Traditional media is very different from creating ad copy.

I agree that writing ad copy and producing brand-sponsored content require different approaches, and that a background in journalism is helpful to content producers on the agency dime. However, speaking from my own experience, the two practices can be performed by the same person, or team. Just like a gifted guitar player can pick up the banjo and/or mandolin and sound great, a writer grounded in both advertising and content can weave a story in both venues, and move from one to the other without a hitch.

For me, it’s about intent. Great advertising reveals a core truth about the product or service in a fresh, “why didn’t I think of that?” fashion. Through strategic and repeated media placements, the new idea gets adopted by prospects and brand value is created. Brand-sponsored content, on the other hand, often has a very loose connection, or no connection at all, to the product or service in question. Content’s intent is to inform or entertain. When it’s done right, content is a gift.

Direct and brand advertising come with an ask; therefore, advertising is often an unwelcome intrusion, not a gift. Once you understand the difference, and you have real world experience creating both ads and content for brands, there’s no reason both services can’t live under one roof (as they do at Bonehook).

By the way, here I am getting the News pages together at The College Reporter in Lancaster, PA, circa 1984:

“If we are any good at what we do, we believe, then we should not have to talk people into hiring us.” -Blair Enns, author of Win Without Pitching

It’s a new year and from a business perspective a time to make annual assessments and projections. I’ve been doing what we all do, looking at income from last year, how many clients we served (ten!) and what clients were most profitable.

I’ve also been looking at how to accelerate the company in 2012 and what kind of advanced learning opportunities are available to me. While I already know that sales is service and success in sales is dependent on relationships, Blair Enns, a business development consultant to creative firms, is helping me to see what else selling is and how to best practice it today.

Proper selling can be distilled into three steps, based on the client’s place in the buying cycle. These three steps replace the art of persuasion.

To sell is to:

1. Help the unaware

2. Inspire the interested

3. Reassure those who have formed intent

In other words, new business development isn’t something persuaders do. It’s something educators and motivators do.

Enns is also a big believer in using thought leadership to establish one’s expertise. When you’re clearly the one person, or one firm that’s right for the job, a.k.a the clear expert, you win without pitching.

Of course, it’s not always possible to win without pitching. That’s why other more traditional sales gurus advise Biz Dev pros to “tie your solution to a pending regulation or other impending event” or “align the solution to a strategic objective.”

Speaking of aligning the solution to a strategic objective, I recently started using the free version of Capsule CRM, and am happy to report that it’s a nifty piece of software that helps me see what’s in the sales pipeline and how much revenue is on the line. If you need a similar Salesforce-like tool, give it a spin.

One of the things I get excited about is hiring friends to help me tell a brand’s story. I’m currently working with two friends on a web refresh project. One of these friends, Scott Baker, is a high school history teacher by day and a photographer by night. He also loves soccer, so he was the ideal person to call when Portland Indoor Soccer needed some new images.

These two shots (and dozens more) will be featured on the newly reconstructed PDXIndoorSoccer.com when it launches this month.

Should your brand be active on Twitter? It’s a common question today and one that will be answered affirmatively by marketing services providers eager to bill for the incremental time.

But let’s take additional billings out of the equation for a minute. If you’re asking someone who is a deep believer in the power of social media, you will no doubt hear about Twitter’s ability to bolster customer service, how it’s all about listening now and how this new channel provides unprecedented transparency and changes the voice of the brand from something prepackaged and contrived to something authentic and real time. In other words, Twitter is powerful stuff and only a fool would stay away from it.

My own Twitter habits are well established. I maintain three accounts: @davidburn, @bonehook and @adpulp. Unlike Facebook, where I dip in and out, Twitter is always on when I have a browser window open and it is generally the first iPhone app I call up (unless I am about to take a photo). In other words, Twitter is powerful stuff and only a fool would stay away from it.

I am being facetious. It’s not all good in the neighborhood. Let’s examine this short exchange from 24 hours ago:

I am grateful to Cory O’Brien for participating in this quick chat, because it would have been sad to have this chat alone. Yet, that’s precisely what I have come to expect. A monologue, not a dialogue. The lack or real banter is frustrating. It also leads us down a path where “no response” is acceptable behavior, if not the norm in our culture.

As Fast Company and Tom Peters told us 14 years ago, we are all brands now. Brands equipped with powerful communications tools that are easy to use and practically free of cost. Given that we go to Twitter intent on building our brands, it is no wonder that no one’s listening or responding.

While many on Twitter do show up to blow their self-promotional horns, there are plenty of others seeking genuine dialogue. Brands who have been advised to “join the conversation” are definitely seeking conversations with prospects and customers. Yet, those conversations are in short supply. And they’re not really conversations. Twitter is a sea of fragments moving fast toward the digital ocean. Something resembling a one-to-one conversation can happen in the middle of Twitter, but is a rushing stream of “look at me” fragments and hyperlinks really the best place for it?

Of course, Twitter is not the only place where people and brands are talking at people, not with them. Facebook, LinkedIn and many blogs all suffer from the same problem, which is caused in part by the growing attention deficit epidemic. Many of us simply do not have time to engage with our real life friends on the phone or our digital acquaintances online, much less brands.

In the ad business, there’s an old adage about the need for the work to “break through the clutter.” The saying no longer applies. The clutter today is at a level we’ve never before experienced. The clutter has taken over completely. Ergo, there’s no breaking through the clutter. Instead, one needs to set themselves, or their brand, apart from the clutter. How? By not adding to it.

Right now there are smart people, people in marketing, using Twitter to blast out their daily monologues. There’s no need to name them, you can find them easily enough. It may seem counter intuitive, but as the noise increases the best response is not louder shouts or Tweets of your own. The need for high quality thinking, writing and sharing is dire (to say nothing of the need for some restraint). Provide it and you give people a reason to pause and consider, and possibly to act.

My friend Reggie Wideman at tenfour needed a new smartphone, as many of us do from time to time. But before going to the store to buy one, he decided to let voters in an online poll choose his phone for him.

Voters in the poll picked the iPhone 4S by a wide margin over the HTC Titan (running Windows) and the Samsung Galaxy (running Android).

Reggie describes the differences in metaphorical terms:

The iPhone is like a pristine, planned community with credit and background checks just to get a visitor’s pass. Android is like, well, it’s like New York City: everything all the time, just the way you want it, but also dirty, confusing and sometimes it just doesn’t work as expected. As for Windows Phone OS, I’m not even sure yet. It’s feeling like something in the middle—maybe downtown Chicago.

I left this comment on Reggie’s post:

I like how open to new things you are Reggie. I want to be like you, so I opted for something different this week–the HTC Inspire running Google’s Android mobile OS. At first, I was WOWed by the speed of the 4G network and the phone’s processor, but now I’m starting to waver along with the device’s battery, every few hours. I want to break Apple’s spell, but doing so is troublesome. The Apple fanboy thing is annoying, but there is a very solid reason for it. Exceptional design that lifts spirits.

I went to the AT&T store today and almost dumped the new HTC I bought at Costco for a new phone I know I will love, the iPhone 4 or 4S. But I didn’t. First, I want to see if the Advanced Task Killer app I installed (at the recommendation of the AT&T sales person) will preserve the battery. Right now, a full charge is only good for three or four hours max, which makes me wonder how a phone like this is ever released in the first place.

I am pleased that I can nearly replicate the iPhone experience with an Android smartphone, but it’s the little things that count and forgetting the horrendous battery problem for a second, Apple’s user interface is simply cleaner and more intuitive.

Just because I want there to be a more affordable alternative to Apple does not mean that there is one. Not yet, anyway.

On the whole, I’d say this “trying on” period is somewhat trying. I’m thinking about phones when I don’t want to. A smartphone and the operating system it runs on ought to be an afterthought. When the expensive devices we put at the center of our day are hard to figure out or use, we might like what they can do but we won’t bring ourselves to love them.

In related news, this Fortune article suggests that nearly half a million of the estimated 3.9 million Kindles to be shipped this quarter will be returned to Amazon.

Meanwhile, the satisfaction ratings for iPads are simply off the charts.

With all the digital this and digital that on our plates, it’s easy to lose touch with your roots in this business.

Thankfully, there’s still a need for print advertising, because making a new two-page spread for a client is the kind of assignment that brings you back — to Earth, and to the reasons you got into advertising in the first place.

Our client Danville Development Corp. of Salt Lake City manages 15 well cared for properties for low income seniors and people with disabilities. The Danville team also helps people navigate the HUD application process and find a comfortable home for their retirement years. Therefore, we chose to step away from the typical product features approach you see in ads in this category and focus instead on the brand benefits.

As for the choice to run print, Danville’s prospects use the web like everyone else (and this ad drives people to the web), but the media buy here recognizes that searching Google is not the end all and be all for every product or service, nor for every audience.

The new ad will run in Seniors Blue Book, a pub that reaches 150,000 people via its printed Utah edition.

Raf Stevens, author of the newly published book, No Story, No Fans, has an important message for those of us busy developing content for our clients.

What helps great content to spread is how compelling and inspiring the message is, not how it slants toward positioning your company as the only one to buy from. Content should make connections. I’ll go even further than that. Content follows connection. First, you need to engage, build rapport, and make your audience trust you. Pure information or marketing messages do not make that happen. If you communicate in facts and figures, you are communicating “brain to brain.” To be a successful storyteller, you need to communicate human to human, heart to heart, and emotion to emotion.

Interestingly, the best ads also reach people at an emotional level. Yet, clients who pony up big bucks to create and place an ad or to improve their website are acting rationally. They want more business and are willing to do what is necessary to make the register ring. The take away here is that it is imperative to move from the rational to the emotional when appealing to prospects and customers.

Yesterday at a Portland Ad Fed luncheon, a principal of another Portland agency told me that content marketing is just writing. No. It is writing and/or video created on a client’s behalf, but there’s no direct sell packaged up in the message, rather there’s entertainment or utility worth seeking out and sharing courtesy of the sponsoring brand.

Let’s take a look at this new content offering from Patagonia, a master of the form:

Six and a half minutes of video from an outdoor clothing company, and no mention or even a hint of product marketing. There’s no need for it, because Patagonia knows what matters to its customers — in this case environmental damage being done to a wild place.

That’s the model in a nutshell. Find the shared points of interest between the company and its customers and focus there. Perfectly executed content marketing like Patagonia’s doesn’t do away with salesmanship. In many cases, traditional marketing is still needed to induce transactions. Content doesn’t replace advertising, it lives side-by-side with it.

One of the best things about social media marketing for small business is the fact that small businesses, unlike some corporate monoliths, are actually social in real life. In a small business there is a real face and a voice behind the brand; thus, participating in online social channels is typically a good fit.

According to a new survey from Constant Contact, 60% of small business owners/managers (or their agents) engage with customers and prospects who post comments on social media platforms, whether those posts are positive or negative.

Susan Payton, President of Egg Marketing & Communications, suggests that the 40% of small businesses not currently responding to customers and prospects get busy.

Consumers are rapidly becoming their own radio stations, and people are always listening. If they’re saying something good about you, you can reap the rewards. If they’re tweeting their frustrations about your company, your silence could cost you more customers. Brands who are stepping up to take blame and apologize are finding consumers more willing to forgive, and the damage doesn’t spread so far.

On the other hand, if people are saying great things about you, that’s all the more reason to interact! A Google + mention of how a customer loves your brand gives you the unique opportunity to build a relationship with that person. Social media users are loyal customers, especially when they’re treated right.

In other small business news…speaker, consultant and author Barry Moltz argues that, “Success in business is really about building the best distribution and marketing for the product. This is where so many business owners forget to focus.”

It would be nice if the best product or service consistently won the attention and admiration of customers and that’s all there was to it. But that’s not the case.

The good news is participating in social channels is a means to connect with people, gather consumer insights, provide customer service and manage your firm’s reputation. These are the marketing wheels that help drive a business forward today.

If you want some help “getting behind the wheel” as it were, let me know. Social media strategy and activation is one part of what we offer here — it ladders well with content and relationship marketing which are at the heart of our practice.

We’ve been listening to Okkervil River since 2007, when The Stage Names came out.

Last night at Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon we go to see the band perform in a beautiful outdoor setting. AgesandAges opened the bill, followed by Okkervil River and The Decemberists.

Okkervil River’s founding members became friends at Kimball Union Academy, a prep school in Meriden, New Hampshire, and after parting ways for college moved to Austin, Texas to live together and start a band.

The band takes its name from a short story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya, which is another clue as to their intelligence and where they’re coming from.

Okkervil River’s new album, I Am Very Far, was released on May 10, 2011. This is how NPR describes the record:

It’s a bold departure from how the group has operated so far. Sheff’s vocals are creaky, but his lyrics are dazzling; his arrangements are sloppy, but his hooks are indelible. The band’s trademark has always been the union of those elements into a beautiful mess. I Am Very Far reverses that formula: The storytelling is knotty, cryptic and David Lynch-like in its ominous weirdness, while the music is so severe and precise as to be terrifying at times.

In other words, it’s not a pop album. Rather, it’s a unique work from a band that finds a way to sound unlike every other band playing today — a fact for which they must be praised.

Of course, last night’s headliner, The Decemberists, are also totally unique. Darby and I call their style, “Sea Shanty music.”

Interestingly, this strange form has caught on, making The Decemberists a mainstream act, at least where record sales, touring schedules, radio airplay and critical acclaim are concerned. In fact, there was evidence of this last light, as only two in ten fans noticeably belonged to the hipster tribe.

I’ve been playing with free streaming music service, Spotify, for a few weeks now (ever since the Stockholm-based service launched in the U.S). I now wonder if there’s a reason to buy music ever again.

Spotify does not have every track one might desire in its library of 15 million tracks, but I’ve been able to locate 90% of what I’m looking for — mostly albums I don’t own from artists that I know I like. When I find the albums I want, I merely drag them over to the left-hand sidebar to create a new playlist. Then the album is always there for me when I open Spotify, without paying a thing for it.

See you later, iTunes.

Cupertino’s got to be hating this. Spotify’s user interface (UI) even looks like iTunes’.

According to Los Angeles Times, Warner Music chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., is one music exec not hating Spotify (note: Warner, three other major record labels and an independent label own a little over 17% of Spotify).

He predicted that Spotify, which is currently paying more money for music royalties than it makes in subscriptions and advertising, would be profitable if it can continue to induce its free users to spring for the premium service.

“The kinds of levels that Spotify is currently achieving in Europe is also extremely encouraging,” Bronfman said. “If that keeps up, they will be a very profitable business themselves.”

Presently, 1.6 million mostly European users pay for Spotify’s premium service, which lets them use the service on mobile devices and home audio systems such as Sonos. The free stream is ad supported.

Subscriptions run $9.99-a-month in the U.S., or about $120 a year. I used to spend $120 in a month with the iTunes store, but all that ended when I changed my iTunes store ID in the fall of 2008, an unfortunate step that rendered all the songs I purchased from Apple unplayable on all my Apple devices. No, I’m not joking.

But back to Spotify, I have to say it’s a great music discovery engine, as well. I’m currently listening to YACHT, for instance — something I might not do if I had to pay for the privilege. Should YACHT or the other bands I’m discovering on Spotify become new favorites, I’ll eventually pay to seem them live, and I’ll no doubt end up writing about them and/or telling friends about them.

By the way, this is the service MySpace could have launched but didn’t. It’s also much more intuitive than Last.fm, Blip.fm, HypeMachine and a host of other start-ups that have tried to advance in this space. If I want a random playlist based on past preferences, there’s Pandora. Other than that, I’m looking for music on Spotify.

On Tuesday, Dawes’ new album Nothing Is Wrong was released by ATO Records.

The L.A. folk-rock quartet recorded the disc at producer Jonathan Wilson’s Echo Park studio late last year in between touring commitments. Jackson Browne appears on the record and band leader, Taylor Goldsmith, says the band was aiming for an “American rock & roll” sound inspired by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Bob Seger.

I really like the first song on the record, “Time Spent In Los Angeles.” In an interview with Street Date Radio, Goldsmith is asked if there intentionally a California vibe to this album?

Goldsmith: It’s not an intentional thing, I just write about what I feel like I have a good concept of and everybody feels like they have a close relationship with the world that they come from…It’s not like I’m trying to represent California, I’m more just trying to represent me and I happen to be in California when I’m not on the road. “Times Spent in Los Angeles” (and this goes for anyone from anywhere, I just happened to use the town LA), but when there are a hundred people in the room and two of them are from LA, I believe that they can kind of pick each other out. I think that the environment that we all come from dictates who we are and I feel like there is a complicated quality to someone from LA. It is half cynical and half just devastatingly realistic and I have a complicated relationship with it. I think that exists anywhere and I love that.

Darby and I saw Dawes last year at this time, when they opened for Josh Ritter at The Wonder Ballroom. This is a band that’s making progress and I expect their new album to be well received by skinny jeans-wearing hipsters and old folk rockers, alike.

My cousin Joshua Cain Daugherty came to town last week with Wammo vs. Forsyth, an offshoot of the Austin-based band, Asylum Street Spankers. It’s fun to see Joshua in action as a rock and roll tour manager. For such a laid back dude, he gets the musicians where they need to be, when they need to be there.

Before the show, Joshua was hyping Guy Forsyth a bit, saying what a pro he is and how he practices a lot and has great stage presence. I wondered if I would see the craftsmanship on stage at The Alberta Rose, and I did. Forsyth, it turns out is a gentleman and a songster. He reminds me of an old-time kind of guy that rides the rails and tells the tales.

MP3 Offerings: “Piece Of The Pie” a track from Live at Gruene Hall and “Things That Matter” live at the Mucky Duck in Houston (recorded by Joshua on 2/12/11).

I decided to purchase The Chicago Transit Authority from Amazon the other day and the 1969 release from this hugely popular band is definitely worth the every penny. You might even call the double album a masterpiece of jazz fusion and rock.

Released in April 1969, the album (sometimes informally referred to simply as “CTA”) proved to be an immediate hit, reaching #17 in the US and #9 in the UK. While critical reaction was also strong, the album initially failed to produce any hit singles, and the group was seen as an album-oriented collective until their producer James Guercio later shortened some of the tracks for radio.

While clicking around these tubes to learn more about the band’s origins, I found fragments of a documentary that features Chicago in their native studio setting, the 4000 acre Caribou Ranch near Nederland, Colorado, which was purchased by Guercio for $1 million in 1971.

According to a page on Invicta Records’ website, Chicago filmed a network television special there, “Chicago: High in the Rockies” in 1973, the year Caribou Ranch opened. A second TV special “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” was broadcast in 1974.

Elton John’s 1974 album Caribou was recorded at, and named after, the studio. Other artists who made records at Caribou Ranch include Earth Wind & Fire, The Beach Boys, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Joe Walsh, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Carole King, Waylon Jennings, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, America, Chick Corea, Deep Purple and the list goes on. Chicago recorded a total of five studio albums in Nederland: Chicago VI, Chicago VII, Chicago VIII, Chicago X, and Chicago XI.

My research also revealed that Guercio founded Country Music Television and is a major landowner in Colorado and Montana. He also has his hand in cattle ranching, as well as energy and mineral investments. He has also amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of Gen. George Custer’s papers.

Grateful Dead hasn’t played a show in 16 years. Yet the band just sold through all 7200 individually numbered, limited edition versions of EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS in four days. Each box set sells for $450.

When you do the math, that’s $3,240,000. And this is merely the opening round. The band will continue to offer the 72-disc collection for $450, it just won’t come with all the cool packaging and shit.

“Well love is love and not fade away.”

The now sold out limited edition version comes housed in a replica steamer trunk reminiscent of the ones prevalently used at the time. Along with the music–a vast majority of which is previously unreleased–the travel chest contains tour memorabilia, a coffee-table book with never-before-seen photos and a comprehensive essay by noted author Blair Jackson. Both the limited edition and CD-only versions are set to ship in September.

EUROPE ’72: THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS offers a snapshot of a band at the top of its game, still ascending in the wake of three straight hit albums—Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, and the live Grateful Dead a.k.a. “Skull & Roses”. It had been a year since the lineup had gone to its single-drummer configuration, six months since Keith Godchaux had been broken in as the group’s exceptional pianist, and this marked the first tour to feature Donna Godchaux as a member of the touring band.

I’d like to see the band makes other definitive tour collections. Europe ’90, for instance, would be one I’d make room for, given that I was in Stockholm, Essen, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Paris and London to hear every note.

Stax/Concord will release the appropriately titled, Man In Motion, from singer-songwriter and rock star Warren Haynes on May 10.

The new album is a snapshot of a creatively restless musician who is constantly in artistic motion himself. “Musicians are students for life. We have to continually take new approaches,” affirms Haynes.

Here are two tracks from the album, played live at Christmas Jam last December:

Man In Motion clocks in at over an hour, allowing for its ten tracks to breathe and develop. The studio band includes Ivan Neville on background vocals and organ, Ian McLagan on piano, Ruthie Foster on background vocals, George Porter, Jr. on bass and Ron Holloway on saxophone. Haynes recorded the album at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios to two-inch tape with vintage tube microphones and everyone playing together in the same room. “We recorded it live to capture the emotion, passion, and spontaneity.”

“Soul music was my first love,” says Haynes. “The first LPs I had growing up in Asheville were greatest hits compilations from Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, James Brown, Junior Walker, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, Wilson Pickett, and The Supremes.”

All CD, LP and Bundle pre-orders will receive an Exclusive Bonus DVD, featuring the Warren Haynes Band’s complete set from last December’s Christmas Jam in Asheville.

Lucinda Williams’ new album, Blessed, has been out for two weeks. So there’s no excuse for you not to buy it and put it instantly into heavy rotation on your playback device of choice.

Martin Chilton, Digital Culture Editor at The Guardian is fully on board (if that means anything to you).

Although she has been performing for 37 years, she is still at the height of the song-writing prowess that prompted Time magazine to call her ‘America’s finest songwriter’.

The sad song “I Don’t Know How You’re Living” is about her brother, whom she admits she “hasn’t heard from in a long time”.

Bleak and haunting too is “Seeing Black” as she tries to make sense of the mind of a suicidal friend (the late songwriter Vic Chesnutt, who was recently the subject of an album of covers by The Cowboy Junkies called Demon).

Williams said: “Yeah, it was inspired by Vic. I should have said that instead of saying it was about him. It was inspired by his suicide, which happened during the time that I was writing. It was so sudden and shocking and stunning and sad . . . He had a wicked, wild sense of humor. And he had this sweetness about him.”

Elvis Costello, who sang a duet with Williams on 2008’s “Little Honey,’’ contributes searing guitar work on a handful of songs. Having admired his previous work in various genres, Williams chose Don Was to co-produce the album, and his touch is often “light and ethereal,” according to Boston.com.

The new Lost Highway album needs very little promotion, but the label produced a series of well-made Web videos anyway. Here’s one:

South By Southwest Music Conference is underway in Austin. I wish I could be there to take in the sounds and sights, not to mention all the BBQ.

Guess I’ll have to make do with the free 22-song sampler that SXSW is offering from its site. Whoa is me.

The disc features new music from Jessica Lea Mayfield, The Civil Wars, Lucinda Williams, Bright Eyes and Hayes Carll, among others.

Here’s a video from Mayfield performing “Sometimes at Night” from her album, Tell Me live at the Kent State Folk Festival in her hometown of Kent, OH. The album, produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, is out now on Nonesuch Records.

I also like this “official video” from Nashville duo The Civil Wars:

According to Twangville, the harmonies between Joy Williams and John Paul White of The Civil Wars “have a dark sweetness to them that grows even darker as gothic-folk arrangements envelope them.”

Gothic-folk. I like.