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.
Learn MoreCartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, & Doodling in Meetings
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A couple years ago, I went to the Cannes Lions, the main show for advertising. There’s a giant gallery room in the basement of the main Palais building with all the work submitted for awards. As I walked past the ads and case studies, all I could think about was how the sausage gets made. The creative “idea” usually gets…
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Former ad copywriter and Gaping Void cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once wrote, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” It’s not just advertising that can be off-putting. The way businesses talk in lead generation is generally worse, partly because there’s the illusion of personalization. AI and personalization tech have made it…
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I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by today’s content overload and the circular creator economy. When I left college in the 90s, I moved to Prague and found a job at Velvet, an English-language magazine for the booming but close-knit expat scene. At that strange time when Eastern Europe opened up, there were more than 20 different English-language newspapers and…
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A friend sent me a William Blair research report this week that characterized enterprise AI adoption as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Just about every organization has started to use AI tools in some fashion. But there’s little orchestration of how those tools are actually used. And very little alignment across the enterprise. A 2025 MIT report suggested…
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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.
This week’s cartoon goes out to my friend Ann Handley, who has been putting up a valiant defense for the em dash (—). As Ann put it recently: “People are patrolling the streets, rounding up em dashes like it’s CSI: Grammar Unit. “Use one in a paragraph? That means you’re secretly AI! You’re generating your LinkedIn posts with a boiling…
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LinkedIn reported that the percentage of US job postings that include the term “storyteller” doubled last year from the year before. Katie Deighton recently wrote about this in the WSJ: “Marketing and technology companies have often repurposed grandiose descriptions from other arenas to lend corporate office roles additional sparkle. While the heyday of technology gurus, developer ninjas, SEO rockstars and…
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I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by some of the latest growing pains of human-AI collaboration. As AI gets more autonomous, the traditional “human in the loop” oversight model is showing strain. With pressure to “10X productivity” with fleets of AI agents, how best to keep up with the avalanche and complexity of approvals? The “human in the loop” risks…
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The marketing industry’s obsession with youth is nothing new. Thinking about what makes the next generation of consumers tick is a perennial activity. Generic one-size-fits-all advice on how to crack the code on Gen Z (age 16-29) and Gen Alpha (age 0-16) circulates constantly. Sometimes these generations are awkwardly bundled together as “Gen Zalpha.” Much of it trades in lazy…
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Almost exactly 6 years ago, as things started to shut down for Covid, I drew a cartoon about the challenges of planning in a time of uncertainty. An executive holds up a coin and says, “We need to update our forecast. Heads, this will blow over soon. Tails, it’s the end of the world.” At the time I shared a…
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My AI Mad Libs cartoon last week on urgency without clarity in AI strategy was one of my most licensed cartoons from the last 24 years. It got me thinking of the trickle-down effects of muddled strategy through an organization. Whenever there’s ill-defined strategy at the top, there will be poor alignment all the way down. This is particularly true…
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We’re in a strange time of urgency without clarity in AI adoption. The pressure is on to adopt everything everywhere all at once. A case in point is agentic AI. Suddenly the term “agentic” is used indiscriminately in everything from strategy decks to marketing copy. Even simple chatbots are being called agents. The pace seems driven by hype and panic…
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A few year ago, Mark Ritson wrote a handy guide to creating a marketing plan and critiqued those who make “PowerPoint decks by the yard.” Mark wrote: “Most marketing plans are PowerPoint presentations. Nothing wrong with that. But they are just too damned long – 50, 100, 200 slides in a plan. This is a shithouse way to present anything.…
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Super Bowl ads have always juggled story power and star power. But the overall swing toward celebrities has been an ongoing trend. In 2010, just 31% of Super Bowl ads included a famous face. Last year, a whopping 68% of Super Bowl ads featured celebrities and 51% featured multiple celebrities, according to iSpot.tv and EMARKETER. (I haven’t seen the final…
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Steve Jobs famously described the computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Last week, my old friend Jason Copeland invited me to join a Silicon Valley roundtable he moderated with a fascinating topic: “Will AI be a bicycle for the mind? Or an autopilot to which we passively delegate human judgment and creativity? “We’re biologically hardwired to adopt tools that…
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Marketers use have long used personas as a tool to try to bring customers into the room — to help organizations be more customer-centric. They’re intended to help with everything from innovation to experience design to marketing and sales. A software engineer named Alan Cooper is credited with creating the first persona in 1985. Looking for a better way to…
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Many organizations use some form of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end. Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. By design, the innovation funnel leads…
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I recently spoke at a conference with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, and he shared a fascinating insight about the influence of ad platforms on how we think about marketing. Rory said that many of the metrics that marketers chase are not designed to serve the brand. They’re designed to serve the platforms that provide those metrics. Rory coined…
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There’s an old search engine joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results. When search engines are the primary mode of finding information, brands do everything they can to be on the first page. That includes SEO tactics to become one of the ten blue links as well as sponsored ads…
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My friend Ann Handley once described my cartoons as a type of diary, which rings true to me. Since 2002, I’ve drawn this cartoon series as a kind of open diary to help make sense of whatever I’m noticing around me. As we wrap up 2025, here are some of my personal favorite diary moments from this past year. Not…
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Businesses have never had greater and more varied data at their disposal. But the stubborn issue of data silos continues to plague what they can do with it. AI alone can’t fix this. AI is only as useful as the quality of the data that it has access to. And all the hype and promise of agentic AI will run…
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