Why this book

Marketing has changed faster than the textbooks that teach it.

Every morning, billions of people reach for their phones before anything else. They scroll, search, and skim — and before they have said a word out loud, they have already met dozens of brands through ads, search results, and content in their feeds. That moment, multiplied across a whole population, is the terrain of digital marketing. It is also the terrain most introductory textbooks were never built to cover.

And the customer is no longer the only one deciding. Search engines choose what gets seen, recommendation systems assemble the offer, generative AI drafts the campaign, and increasingly, software shops on a person's behalf. Reaching the customer is no longer enough; you have to be understood by the machine the customer asks.

The book is organized around a single observation: marketing now happens in four conversations, defined by who is speaking and who is deciding. It calls that structure the Conversation Grid, and returns to it wherever a new channel raises an old question.

For years, instructors have patched the gap with white papers, platform blogs, and video tutorials, because the available texts couldn't keep pace with the field. Digital Marketing Essentials was written to close that gap: a rigorous, genuinely current first course that teaches not only the what and the why of digital marketing, but the how — the strategies, tools, and judgment students need to walk into a co-op placement or a first job ready to contribute. It is written in the same clear, practical style as Marketing: An Introduction, and grounded in Canadian companies, Canadian consumers, and Canadian law.

Written for the field as it is now

A digital marketing textbook goes stale faster than almost any other. This one was written on the assumption that its reader is working in the version of the field that exists now — not the one that existed when the outline was approved. For this first edition, every case, statistic, tool, and legal reference was verified against primary sources, and where the ground had shifted — from AI search to agentic commerce to Canadian privacy reform — the text was rewritten to match rather than patched.

A Canadian advantage, not a handicap

This book takes a deliberately Canadian point of view — and treats it as a strategic asset, not a compliance cost. Canada has its own regulatory architecture for digital marketing: CASL's strict consent rules for commercial messages, PIPEDA governing personal data, Quebec's Law 25, and the Online News Act. Canadian marketers have long experienced all of this as a tax. That framing was always wrong, and it is now expensively wrong.

The rest of the world is converging on the Canadian position. Browsers block third-party cookies, mobile platforms have turned tracking into a permission customers must actively grant, and regulators in Europe and the U.S. are legislating toward requirements Canadian marketers have already spent a decade learning to work inside. Students who learn to build on data customers actually chose to share aren't learning a Canadian peculiarity — they're learning the thing everyone else is about to have to learn.

Built in a classroom that feeds industry

The book grew out of a program rebuild. In 2021, the British Columbia Institute of Technology asked Danielle Wilson to redevelop its marketing communications specialty; the result was ten new coordinated courses and a renamed program — Digital Marketing and Brand Strategy — which she now leads. The curriculum is reworked with industry every year (not reviewed, reworked), and twenty agencies and in-house marketing teams were consulted in developing this text.

Students complete a ten-week, four-day-a-week internship inside a working marketing team, and about 85% of graduates begin work in the field immediately after finishing. Every framework in this book was taught to students who then walked into an agency or marketing department within months — and came back to say which parts were useful and which were merely academic. The frameworks in these pages are the ones that survived.

What it's built on

Four ideas run through every chapter.

What's inside

Thirteen chapters that move from foundations to channels to strategy. Each is self-contained enough to support a modular course, but the sequence builds cumulatively — so instructors can teach in the order that fits their course.

The frameworks

The part of the book most likely to still be useful in five years. Each is a tool for thinking, introduced alongside the specific failure it is built to prevent. All are original to this text. Two run underneath the whole book:

Most chapters then add a framework of their own, each aimed at a failure common in that discipline:

How each chapter works

Every chapter uses the same set of features, designed to carry students from a clear statement of what they should be able to do, through the concepts and vocabulary, into real application and assessment.

What makes it different

Not another overview. A course you can teach from and learn from.

Who it's for

Written for the classroom, useful well beyond it.

About the author

Publishing details — ISBN, formats, and retailers — will be added closer to launch. Publication date is subject to change.

© 2026 Danielle Wilson · Digital Marketing Essentials is forthcoming from Pearson Education.