Pioneers of Digital: Success Stories from Leaders in Advertising, Marketing, Search and Social Media

If you embrace new media and the spell it has cast over advertising and the world in general, this may be your lucky day. Digital media expert Springer (Ads to Icons) and Carson, a digital marketing executive at Microsoft, present a compilation of 20 brief yet thorough, and sometimes fascinating, sketches of digital pioneers. June Cohen joined the digital revolution in 1991, when she was at Stanford and one could "breathe in technology along with the air," and went on to work with HotWired and the TED Conference, bringing TEDTalks public. Danny Sullivan, a technical journalist, was writing about SEO years before the birth of Google. Malcolm Poynton's Dove Campaign for Real Beauty was the "first full Web-based advertising campaign," reaching 200 million women. Qi Lu, at Microsoft, had the temerity and enthusiasm to take on Google with Bing and earned almost "mythical reputation for leading and inspiring." These concise profiles makes for quick reading, with useful "sound bytes" at the end of each chapter, though the concluding "Lessons for Pioneers" is less compelling. Readers will feel like kids in a digital candy shop. (Nov.)