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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This cartoon idea was suggested by Brian Fung, reacting to some interesting Google research on how even a one-second delay affects bounce rates. Google found that as page load time goes from 1s to 3s, the probability of bounce increases 32%. As it goes from 1s to 5s, the probability of bounce increases 90%. Brian questioned how much had do…
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I’ve never understood why so many brands turn the choice of unsubscribing from their newsletter into a negative brand experience. Or why purchasing a t-shirt means that the retailer assumes you want to hear from them 5 times a week for the rest of your life. It’s as old as digital marketing, but the humble email newsletter remains one of…
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Consumers increasingly look for sustainability credentials in the brands they buy. And yet, whenever brands talk about sustainability, consumers are increasingly sensitive to green-washing and hypocrisy. Google caught flak most recently for hosting a climate change summit on the coast of Sicily a few weeks ago, when it came out that over 100 of the celebrity attendees turned up…
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In an advertising shoot, we often hear someone say, “we’ll fix it in post”. It can be comforting to hear (particularly at the end of a long day), but it’s often a cop out. Marketers learn the hard way that there’s only so much that we can actually fix in post-production. Our source footage limits how much we can…
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“If marketing kept a diary, this would be it.”
- Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs
Packed with nearly 200 marketing cartoons, this new book collection celebrates 15 years of Marketoonist.
McDonald’s is the latest company to ditch the Chief Marketing Officer role, with news that Silvia Lagnado is leaving the company and her role absorbed by restructuring. The CMO role similarly disappeared in recent years at Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Mars, Uber, Lyft, Taco Bell, Beam Suntory, Hyatt, and Coca-Cola. While 70% of the Fortune 500 still have a…
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Cheryl Calverley, CMO at UK mattress brand Eve Sleep recently observed: “We’ve reached peak performance optimization. Everyone has piled in and done the easy stuff in digital marketing … so we come back round in a circle. The only way to stand out from the crowd is creative.” I like Chery’s sentiment of “peak performance optimization”. So much of the…
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I first drew a version of this cartoon almost 10 years ago, and decided to riff on the concept with an updated version. “Make the logo bigger” is still the most common client feedback for creative work, and the quickest way to drive a creative director crazy. A web agency called New Republique once channeled their client frustration into a…
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Brand style guides are traditionally visual. When brand interactions are increasingly screenless, how do brands stand out? How do brands show their identity in a world of sound? Several brands have recently announced new sonic branding strategies in the last year, including HSBC, Coca-Cola, and MasterCard. MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar said that agencies asked if he “was smoking something” when…
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After my Cannes cartoon a couple weeks ago, I heard a lot of crazy stories on how the sausage gets made in the world of advertising. This week’s cartoon was inspired by an anecdote a reader named Mark shared with me about filming in Fiji. In another story, Hershey’s once filmed an ad in a small town in Canada that…
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“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” Jim Barksdale famously said this as the founding CEO of Netscape in the 90s. Two decades later, we’re operating in a very different data-driven world. The question is no longer “if we have data”; it’s what data are we choosing to pay…
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Marketers descend this week on the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Like SXSW and other ideas festivals, it can be inspiring to see some of the most creative work from our industry. But anytime marketers like us get together, we’re in danger of breathing our own exhaust. As inspiring as these festivals are, they potentially…
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I originally drew a version of this cartoon back in 2003 and I decided to redraw it from scratch in color. 16 years later, it’s still one of my more frequently licensed cartoons. I think that speaks to the ever-present challenge of breaking out of organizational silos. I saw a study referenced by Salesforce recently (but couldn’t find the original…
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GDPR celebrated its first anniversary this week with a flurry of new data privacy regulations on the way, including the California Consumer Privacy Act, called “GDPR-lite” or “California GDPR.” One year later, the effectiveness of GDPR is debatable, company compliance is confusing and bureaucratic, and consumers are drowning in a tidal wave of privacy pop-up notices. As Laura Jehl a…
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Forrester reported last year that “firms think they are transforming, but many don’t realize that transformation will be a permanent state of being.” Principal Analyst Ted Schadler went on to write: “21% of firms think their transformation is done and dusted. Really? Done? Another 22% are investigating or not transforming at all. And while 56% of firms are transforming, their…
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Twenty years ago, in early 1999, the HBR published a pioneering article on the future of personalization titled “Is your company ready for one-to-one marketing?” Reading it is a flashback to the heady days of the dot-com era, with Amazon as case study number one. The article states: “Relationship marketing is grounded in the idea of establishing a learning relationship…
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I wrote recently about lackluster creative briefs as a leading cause of lackluster creative. Another common factor is the lackluster creative review. How we run the process of reviewing creative directly impacts the result. Creative can be made stronger by the virtue of additional points of view. But we have to channel those points of view constructively. The path of…
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“In a world where more podcasts are being released than anyone can listen to in a lifetime, the content needs to be highly compelling to attract and retain listeners.” This was a recent observation from Alex White, VP of content at Pandora. As of April 2019, there are over 700,000 unique podcasts on iTunes, with over 29 million episodes. That’s…
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I recently started helping out with a Stanford Business School course called “Humor: Serious Business”, which is teaching students about the power of humor in work. I came across the curriculum while researching my TED Salon talk on humor last fall, and the professors kindly invited me to be their cartoonist-in-residence. Last week, one of the lessons involved talking like…
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Bloomberg reported last week that Amazon employs thousands of workers to listen to voice recordings captured from Echo speakers as part of it’s efforts to improve the performance of Alexa. “Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The…
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Recently the owner of a small hotel in the Philippines called White Banana grew frustrated by the constant stream of requests he received from “wannabe influencers” (his term), each one trying to score a free vacation in return for Instagram posts. He posted the following announcement: “We are receiving many messages regarding collaborations with influencers, Instagram influencers. We kindly would…
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