Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute introduced the 95:5 Rule, a simple but powerful concept that challenged conventional thinking in B2B marketing. In his research, John showed that up to 95% of buyers are not in the market in any one time (and perhaps won’t be for months or years). As he put it: “This is a…
Read More
The NYT published a fascinating article last month on the conundrum of AI accuracy and reliability. They found that even as AI models were getting more powerful, they generated more errors, not fewer. In OpenAI’s own tests, their newest models hallucinated at higher rates than their previous models. One of their benchmarks is called a SimpleQA test, based on general…
Read More
I stumbled across this line from advertising professor Tyler Dolph: “Creative without strategy is called ‘art’ — creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’” The annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which ended a few days ago, always reminds me of the tension of creativity and effectiveness. Last year was the first time I attended this most celebrated advertising award…
Read More
I stumbled across this observation from a product marketer named James Christopher: “When everyone speaks the language of authenticity, no one sounds authentic anymore… “We’ve created a world where the only truly authentic thing is our collective exhaustion with fake authenticity.” Against the backdrop of so many brands pushing “authenticity” as a messaging priority, it’s no wonder that consumers are…
Read More
A strategy has to be more than buzzword-deep. In 2017, a publicly traded beverage company called the Long Island Iced Tea Corp. announced that it was renaming itself Long Blockchain Corp. They gave no justification for the pivot. But based on the name change alone to replace “iced tea” with “blockchain”, their stock price surged 380%. Temporarily, that is –…
Read More
The expression “Garbage In, Garbage Out” emerged in the earliest days of computer science. A 1957 article on US army mathematicians working with old-school IBM mainframes used the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” to describe how poor quality data inputs lead to poor quality outputs. The adage has only grown more relevant in our increasingly data-driven world. Our decisions based…
Read More
Marketing technology has always been something of an arms race. Yesterday’s breakthroughs turns into today’s table stakes. Agentic AI is being touted as the next frontier in the race. Marketers are already starting to implement Marketing AI agents across their tech stacks to analyze customer data, tailor messaging, and run campaigns. These AI agents can operate autonomously, with limited human…
Read More
