1. Marketing in the Era of Accountability
By Les Binet and Peter Field
Published by WARC, 2007
Along with the rest of the IPA's Datamine series, this is probably one of the most important books anyone in communications can read. When I first read it, it gave me confidence in a kind of first-principles scepticism, and a useful North Star in an increasingly complicated, fragmented world. More than the contents, it's what it represents: a non-hysterical, non-fundamentalist, open-minded and open-ended enquiry into what works. And it's full of nickable charts, too.