Book Review: The Curious Digital Marketer by afaqs!

Since June I had received a couple of mailers promoting the book “The Curious Digital Marketer”.  We in India are usually accustomed to buying internet related books published by foreign authors. So it did generate enough curiosity in me to buy the book. The summary of the book was on http://campus.afaqs.com/book_details.html (a bit surprised about the non-seo URL, aren’t they planning on publishing more books?),

The Curious Digital Marketer is a hand book that aims to unearth real and genuine questions related to Digital Media planning and buying, Search Engine Marketing, Facebook Marketing and Mobile Marketing and gets them answered by the leading experts of the trade. It is a compilation of more than 101 frequently asked questions, which advertisers/marketers ask digital media planners while they plan, buy and execute digital media (display advertising, search marketing and social ads) campaigns for them on a day to day basis.

The Curious Digital Marketer has been authored by 18 leading digital marketing practitioners, who have themselves planned and bought digital media inventory for their clients. Media planners (approx. 5 years of experience) from more than a dozen digital agencies like Maxus, Mindshare, Zed Digital, LMG, Pinstorm, Interactive Avenues, Communicate 2, and Media2Win are co-authors of this book.

It was good to see they had a Kindle version. My thoughts about the book,

• They clearly understood what major topics were important –  Digital Media planning and buying, Search Advertising, Facebook Advertising and Mobile Advertising. Clearly Twitter advertising is non-existent in India as of today.
• The most common and important questions have been answered in each of these categories. Answers are right sized, not very short or long.
• Tables, infographics are of high quality.
• Book ideal for anyone starting out a career in digital space. Those who have a lot of experience too can surely browse through it, no harm in learning few things here and there (usually those with many years of experience think they know everything but they don’t)
• The content you find in the book can be found else where on the net but then it is scattered all over the place. Good to have all useful information in ‘one place’.
• Book is not expensive: Rs 350 but discounted on flipkart.
• I could be wrong but I did not find any email id mentioned to give feedback. Always good to get constructive feedback.

So why did the book answer only 101 questions? Because the book is about the “basics” – the first course taught in most western universities have a course code of 101.

The other book I have been regularly buying every year is “The Marketing Whitebook”  published by BusinessWorld. This book gives a good view on various advertising mediums – print, outdoor, TV, radio, internet. Strangely the information page of 2012-13 edition doesn’t have a “buy” button.