The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns In The World: Mastering the Art of Customer Engagement

“The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World brings together an international collection of successful digital marketing campaigns—though perhaps not the most relevant or the latest ones—exploring how businesses have harnessed social media, blogs, forums, online video, and email to boost their brand. It is an interesting addition to an industry that is still very new.”

There is one quirky truth that binds all books about digital and social media together: By the time they are published they are in fact out of date. Same holds true with this book, The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World: Mastering the Art of Customer Engagement. That is not to say that there isn’t a place or a need for this book.

The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World doesn’t live up to the title, but it is an important offering for several reasons. First, in the world of social media, case studies are slowly emerging to prove the importance of this marketing tool. In the traditional marketing field, return on investment is the means of measuring impact. Nobody has been able to figure out ways to capture to ROI of social media until extremely recently. Enter case studies.

The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World takes several digital ad campaigns and expands on how they worked, why they worked, and what the audience and budget were. The astonishing part of some of these case studies is that the budget was nearly nonexistent, and they are still viewed by the authors as some of the most successful digital campaigns in the world.

In this field there are a growing body of resources online, but not so many traditional offerings. For that reason as well this book should appeal to traditional marketing personnel. Frankly, any resource that documents why and how social media/digital campaigns work should be mandatory reading right now for all service professionals, government agencies, and business owners.

While I was looking forward to reading this book because it is a compilation of successful digital media campaigns ranging from big name brands like Pizza Hut to Pepsi, Turbotax, and the presidential campaign for Obama, it leaves a little to be desired.

Books about social media and digital media need to engage on an entirely different level than regular traditional books. They need to think outside the box. So this type of book needs to not only market itself on Twitter and Facebook and run a social media campaign with blog tour or some social media author interaction with readers, but it also needs to update itself in some ways to make it more timely and relevant than a regular book.

Many authors of fiction lately have done more than a few blog tours to generate buzz like Shama Hyder Kabani did for the book The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Readers, marketers, publicity people, and authors should go buy that book if they want to learn creative ways to continue and extend the life cycle of a traditional printed publication.

Social network advertising spending is expected to increase to a staggering $4.3 billion in a bid to attract today’s media savvy consumer, $1.64 billion in the U.S. alone. It is the fastest growing media ever.

This book attempts to capture some recent successes and does a decent job of that. But it by no means covers the best digital media campaigns. There are some creative ideas here. For instance the Dockers iPhone pants dance campaign through Medialets was fun and interactive. A Doritos campaign that was shot outside an insane asylum was very appealing to a teenage demographic. But there are quite a few recent social media campaigns that were even more successful or well publicized than these. The first and most well known—absent from this book—is the obvious Old Spice guy Facebook campaign.

The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World brings together an international collection of successful digital marketing campaigns—though perhaps not the most relevant or the latest ones—exploring how businesses have harnessed social media, blogs, forums, online video, and email to boost their brand. It is an interesting addition to an industry that is still very new.