Spring 2009 43 Marketing Education Review, Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2009). LEIGHANN C. NEILSON (Ph.D., Queen’s University) is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Neilson obtained her Ph.D. (Market- ing and MIS) and M.A. (Sociology) at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada and a B.A. Hons. (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Carleton Uni- versity. Her research interests include the intersection of new commu- nication and information technologies with marketing practice and theory, which motivated her to teach the course on which this paper is based. (email: leighann_neilson@carleton.ca) The author would like to thank Dr. Jane Webster, Queen's University for permission to use and adapt her new technology research exercise, and the students who have made teaching this course such a great learning experience. THE NEW TOOLS BRIEFING: TEACHING NEW MARKETING PRACTICES AND TECHNOLOGY TO STUDENTS Leighann C. Neilson Faced with an environment of constant technological change, how can we as marketing educators equip our students to deal with the impact of new communication and information technologies on marketing practice and research? The teaching innovation described here, the New Tools Briefing, provides an active learning exercise which engages students in researching and evaluating new communication and information technologies. The delivery of the exercise, as part of a third year undergraduate marketing course, is outlined in detail and methods used to assess the innovation’s effectiveness are discussed. Introduction The impact of new communication and information technologies on marketing practice has been identified by the Canadian Marketing Association as one of seven key issues currently facing marketers (Gustavson 2006). Advertising and marketing executives in the United States ranked staying current on industry trends and technolo- gies second on the list of their greatest career challenges in a recent survey reported in Marketing News (Anon 2008). As marketing educators, how can we equip our “digital native” or “netgen” students to deal with succes- sive waves of new technology and its impact on their marketing practice, especially when many of us are strug- gling to deal with these same technologies ourselves (Matulich et al. 2008)? This is the teaching “problem” I was faced with and eventually resolved by employing the teach- ing innovation described here: the New Tools Briefing. Fit with the Marketing Curriculum The New Tools Briefing (hereafter NTB) is an active learning exercise (Tanner and Roberts 1996) I have been using for the last five semesters to help my students and myself learn about new marketing techniques, es- pecially those which are technology-facilitated. The NTB is a group exercise assigned in a course we call Market- ing: New Tools and Approaches. Originally designed to teach students the skills to cope in a world in which e-commerce would become increasingly important, the content of the course has been adapted over time from a primary concentration on the Internet to a focus on helping students learn how to assess new approaches to marketing, including the use of new communication and information technologies. The goal of this course is not to teach students the intimate details of a specific technology, but rather to give them a framework they can use to assess current and future technologies in terms of their potential impact on marketing practice, appropriateness to the type of industry students will work in, and appeal to consumers or business custom- ers. The focus is on developing the kind of applied, real-world skills students are seeking (Karns 1993, 2005). The New Tools Briefing: An Innovation in Teaching To benefit from this innovation, students need to have a basic knowledge of marketing such as gained from an introductory “Marketing Principles” course. It is help- ful if they have taken additional marketing courses, such as Business-to-Business Marketing or Marketing Communications. However, because of the nature of the new tools being investigated, the class often ben- efits from the insights brought by students who are non-Marketing majors. In the past, I have had Journal- ism, Industrial Design, Psychology, Computer Science, and Economics students take the course and each has contributed perspectives which have enriched our Busi- ness students’ way of thinking about marketing. This course usually has a sizeable contingent of international exchange students (averaging about 12% of all students in the class). I have found this facilitates a global per-