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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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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“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.
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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Here we go again. Marketers are circling around a hot new social media property heralded to be the next big thing. One representative FOMO headline — “Brands not on TikTok in 2019 will be left behind.” From a marketing perspective, TikTok promises a perfect storm of big numbers (500 million monthly active numbers and record app downloads), a hard to…
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Apple has used “one more thing…” as a closing catchphrase off and on since 1998. Steve Jobs would pretend the event was over, start leaving the stage, and then would say “one more thing” before revealing some magical new innovation. Tim Cook said it most recently with the launch of the Apple Watch in 2014. The next big Apple event…
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According to Gartner, marketing technology now accounts for 29% of the total marketing budget. That’s currently the single largest area of marketing investment, greater than talent (24%), paid media (23%), and agencies (23%). Scott Brinker started mapping the marketing technology landscape in 2011, with 150 marketing technology solutions available to marketers. In 2018, he released an updated graphic with a…
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As the marketing saying goes, “brands want to be people and people want to be brands.” When Tom Peters wrote “A Brand Called You” in Fast Company in 1997, he first popularized the whole notion of personal branding: “As of this moment, you’re going to think of yourself differently! … You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life, and your…
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As the old maxim goes, you can’t cut your way to growth. Last week, Kraft Heinz posted record losses and an historic goodwill write-down. Many are pointing to years of aggressive and relentless cost-cutting as a root cause. Since their merger in 2015, Kraft Heinz has become the poster child of a budget planning tool called zero-based budgeting (ZBB), evangelized…
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Marketing personas sometimes say more about the marketing team than the customer. Often written out of sight in the ivory towers of marketing, personas are frequently unveiled without clear context of what they mean, how they were formed, or how the rest of the organization is supposed to use them. A couple years ago, I consulted with an early stage…
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