Dan Janal | Publicity and PR Leads Blog

It’s five hours before the kickoff for the Super Bowl and I’m set to make my iron-clad predictions. With apologies to the Who and their Pinball Wizard, I’ll put on my Marketing Wizard hat to predict the three winners are in this year’s Super Bowl.

1. The Who. This year’s halftime act will expose hundreds of millions of people to one of the great groups of the Sixties and Seventies. I saw them in concert in Saratoga, NY and they were fantastic. They’re albums have sold zillions. But today’s youth probably knows them more for the ring tone at the beginning of the TV show CSI (yes, that’s the Who). Now they will become almost as well known as Lady Gaga!

2. Tim Tebow and Focus on the Family. Let’s face it. Many people watch the SuperBowl for the commercials as for the game (especially if the game is a bore!) The true value of any commercial is if it is remembered. I remember cute, talking animals from last year’s ads. I can’t tell you what product they pitched. But I can tell you that Tim Tebow got more media muscle for his ad even before it aired. The commercial has been covered and debated in most daily newspapers and opinion TV shows. It got free replays and it go people talking even BEFORE the show. Even Janet Jackson couldn’t do that. Tebow’s what advertising is all about.

3. Tebow would have been the hands-down winner, except for one Hail-Mary play. What’s better than getting the highest talked about ad? That’s the ad that got the most talk with the least amount spent. For that award, look to Mancrunch.com a company that CBS decided it didn’t want to sell an ad to. By nixing the ad, the company got a ton of PR. But the best part is that rumors are reported that the company didn’t even have the money to pay for the commercial! So they  got a zillion dollars of publicity without spending a penny to produce the ad or buy the ad time!

That’s the play of the day!

What’s the message for you? Controversy creates publicity. What’s controversial in your field? Capitalize on it!

Check out the new duds the U.S. Olympic athletes will wear at the Winter Games in Vancouver.

You’ll see a flag of the United States on one side and a HUGE logo for Ralph Lauren’s Polo.  It might be the camera angle, but the logo looks bigger than the flag. What do you think?

In fact, if you look at the camera angle, the logo is featured, not the flag.

The picture ran in USA TODAY. The article didn’t say if Ralph did this out of the goodness of his heart, or if he paid a fee to sponsor the uniforms. If the former, I wonder how much he paid.

If the money is going toward Olympic athletes’ training, I guess I can’t complain for the big plug. However it does raise the question of how many more logos we’ll see on future uniforms. Will they rival the outfits of NASCAR drivers? Time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m going to buy the cool hat with the moose.

Since I’m knowm for making bold predictions, let me put my neck on the line one more time. I’m usually right, so it’s a prety safe bet!

I predict the iPad will change books and publishing as we know it.

To look to future, I look to the past.  Let me explain.

Back in the early days of publishing, monks and artists wrote books or copies Bibles and Haggadahs and other works. Each work contained not only black letters on white background, but colored fonts, large fonts to draw the eye and most important, illustrations.

When Gutenberg came along and invented the printing press, we started to see the book as we know it today. A bland  series of pages with black on white text. Few illustrations, if any, because they are expensive to produce. And all the type was the same size. So you have no idea if one idea was more important than the other.

We saw the beginnings of the change when Jeffrey Gitomer started writing his marvelous series of books.  Pick one up the next time you are in an aiport bookstore. They are easy to find since they sell like hotcakes. Why? Because Gitomer has gone back to the age of the scribes and took their best ideas. Namely:

- Different sizes fonts so you can see what’s important. It isn’t unusual to see one page with just one sentence displayed in 24 point type. That get’s your attention. You know what’s important.

- Different colored fonts. It’s pretty. Why does reading have to be dull?

- Short chapters. Who has a long attention span today? Need I mention Twitter?

I’m sure many authors would love to copy Gitomer, but their publishers won’t let them because of the expense of printing.

Enter the iPad.

Now authors can design their ebooks with type, fonts, illustrations and color, color, color!

All the new, bold design doesn’t add a penny to production costs.

You’re probably wondering. Why stop there? Why not add audio and video? Perhaps an interview with the author? Or video of a role-playing exercise? The sky’s the limit.

One final point. On a recent flight from Minneapolis to San Diego, my two seat makes each had Amazon Kindles. And everyone who passed by them asked them about it. Ebooks are hot and that’s going to change everything.

Your task: Start thinking about illustrating your books, just like you illustrate your blogs.