Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne, a career marketer and cartoonist.
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In these fast-paced days of digital marketing, there’s a continuous stream of new technologies for marketers to get excited about. It’s tempting for marketers to drop everything in favor of the shiny new thing. Our sense-checking isn’t always caught up with our enthusiasm. We risk being caught without our clothes. Or pretending like we see the clothes, when we don’t.…
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I spoke at a conference last week called MarTech, which focuses on the intersection of marketing and technology. One of their founding insights is that technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically. One of the other speakers talked about the rise of chatbots, and how they will fundamentally change marketing. The speaker shared that 80% of brands expect to be…
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I once heard Seth Godin give a talk to a group of marketers in London. After this session, someone asked his secret to being so productive. Seth not only publishes books and starts ventures, he famously finds the time to reply personally to every single email he receives. Seth replied simply, “I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to…
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Bringing ideas to life in an organization can be a bumpy ride. We’re all familiar with the myth of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree, waiting for inspiration to fall on his head. Newton’s apple is one of the more common symbols of innovation, right up there with Archimedes shouting Eureka from his bathtub. Metaphorically, that’s what we do…
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When last month’s “Communicator of the Year” can turn into this month’s PR disaster, there’s a lesson for any brand on the perils of flubbing a corporate apology. Any brand can go from hero to zero. Much has been written in the last week about the missteps of United and its CEO. Given that it was PRWeek that so recently…
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I was struck by a recent Marketing Week poll that 65% “believe older marketers are being edged out by digital natives in the job market.” The terms “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants” were coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 to define a generational divide of those born before and after the advent of digital. As technology continues to impact every…
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Native advertising is increasingly touted as the future. A new eMarketer study estimates that native advertising in the US will reach $22 billion this year, making up more than half of digital display spend. Their principle analyst Lauren Fisher concluded, “Growth of native digital display is being driven by publishers’ pursuit of higher-value and more mobile-friendly inventory, as well as…
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In content marketing, I think there can be too much emphasis on writing for search engines, and not enough on writing for people. In the mid-to-late 90’s, I worked for an early web developer and remember when search engine optimization first started gaining steam. There was suddenly a “keyword stuffing” arms race. We heard about websites that were putting completely…
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One-to-one marketing has long been considered a holy grail for business. Marketers strive to perfectly personalize the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Technology and large data pools are bringing marketers ever closer to that goal. Yet one-to-one marketing can also be, well, creepy. Marketers have to walk a fine line between useful personalization and going…
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A few years ago, Mark Schaefer mapped the supply-and-demand of content marketing and predicted diminishing returns as the volume of content grows. He called this concept “Content Shock“: “the emerging marketing epoch when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.” Since then, the volume level has only increased. TrackMaven reported that content output per…
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Many organizations have pursued Big Data as a panacea. For years, there has been an implicit strategy to capture as much data as possible and then figure out what to do with all of it later. Big Data has swelled beyond the capacity of data-driven marketers to make sense of it all. IBM estimates that 90% of the world’s data…
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Last week, I shared Marc Pritchard’s manifesto on the state of digital advertising and some of the hazards of a murky and fragmented programmatic media supply chain. One of the challenges is the uncertainty about where digital ads show up. Jaguar Land Rover temporarily halted all UK digital advertising a few weeks ago after learning that one of its ads…
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This cartoon was inspired by the talk P&G CMO Marc Pritchard gave on the state of digital advertising at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting a few weeks ago. His talk is worth reading or seeing in its entirety. Professor and pundit Mark Ritson called it the most important speech about marketing in the last 20 years. Marc Pritchard addresses the…
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In 2015, Google introduced an algorithm update known as “Mobilegeddon” that prioritized mobile-friendly websites and was a wakeup call for marketers. And yet, with customers increasingly mobile first, many brands still treat mobile visitors as mini desktop visitors. Ericcson published a neuroscience study last year that found that the stress caused by using smartphones to find content and complete tasks…
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Super Bowl ads are running $5 million for a 30 second spot this year, twice what they cost 10 years ago. But the ad itself is increasingly only the start. Brands are now investing an extra 25% on top of the media spend to advertise the ads they’re advertising in the Super Bowl. “There’s become more of a ‘game around…
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I’ve never understood web sites that subject visitors to a giant pop-up the moment they arrive demanding their email address. The strong-arm tactic is often used before visitors have even had a chance to read whatever article they came to read. And it’s only the starting gambit. Marketers have a whole grab-bag of passive-aggressive tricks to choose from: pop-ups, slide-ins,…
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“Customer-centric” is frequently claimed by CMO’s to describe their marketing visions. But, like many feel-good marketing buzzwords, “customer-centricity” has lost much of its meaning. Many marketers give it lip service, but there’s not a lot of alignment on how to define it, or where to start. Marketers aren’t as customer-centric as they think. For all the hype, delivering on the…
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It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer. Consumers are scrutinizing more than ever to what goes into the foods they buy. And what constitutes “healthy” to consumers is in flux. The FDA recently announced that it will be calling out “added sugar” on nutrition labels in the future. It is estimated that 68% of processed foods contain added…
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At CES this week, marketers were buzzing about the potential of virtual assistants. “Marketing is much more about providing a great experience or a product that makes a consumer’s life easier and one of the most interesting developments for our business is the virtual assistant,” said Kristin Lemkau, CMO of J.P. Morgan Chase. Most of the attention at CES was…
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United recently announced that it’s joining Delta and American in creating a new Basic Economy fare class, one tier below Standard Economy. This no-frills tier cuts a few of the remaining “frills” of Standard Economy, like overhead bins and pre-assigned seats. It’s a move to help the major airlines compete with discount airlines like Spirit and Frontier. Spirit advertises itself…
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