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’ve been re-reading the 1983 classic, “Ogilvy on Advertising” to see how much has changed — and how much has remained the same — in advertising over the years. One constant is the challenge of how to measure sales impact in advertising, and the tension of long-term brand building versus short-term direct response. As David Ogilvy wrote (more than a…
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A recent survey from Blind found that 83% of marketing and communications professionals are reporting burnout, the highest of any job function. There are likely many factors at play, but I wonder how much of this burnout relates to productivity anxiety, the pressure to be busy, and the hustle culture in business. The pursuit of constant productivity can actually…
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This cartoon is dedicated to Comcast, the most recent company to show me how far we have to go before we reach conversational AI that can come close to a human voice. The only thing worse than the Comcast customer service bot that greeted me when trying to resolve a technical issue was having to have identical conversations with the…
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A Gartner study recently reported that more than half (57%) of CMOs expect to see a return to business as usual in the next 18-24 months. It made me think about what “business as usual” even means right now. Some aspects of how we work have changed so fundamentally, it’s hard to imagine that some of these changes aren’t permanent. …
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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.
We are never finished with digital transformation. In the late 90’s, I worked as a project manager helping build early web sites. For many of the companies I worked with, this was their first-ever web site. One of my clients was a regional airline based in Milwaukee called Midwest Express. I remember big hoopla to celebrate when their web…
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Brand safety has been high on marketers’ agendas since the 2017 YouTube crisis, when some advertisers found their ads next to terrorist videos. Yet the blunt tool response that followed has brought its own problems. Many brands started addressing brand safety with overly broad keyword blocklists that can penalize legitimate content and make it harder to find audiences, limiting reach…
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“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again,” Justin Trudeau famously said in his 2018 speech at Davos. Of course that was two years before COVID-19 changed and accelerated everyone’s plans beyond recognition. A recent McKinsey report chronicled a few examples of organizations making heroic overnight changes in the last…
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COVID-19 is drawing fresh attention to the promise of customer experience management (and all its ancillary marketing buzzwords shown in this cartoon). Yet there’s still a yawning gap between the shiny promise of technology to deliver a better customer experience and the old-fashioned analog organizational limitations that hold back that potential. Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, recently…
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“Universities are no longer nonprofits, but the highest-gross-margin luxury brands in the world,” NYU Professor Scott Galloway wrote recently. Professor Galloway has been exploring the crisis of higher education in the U.S. lately, accelerated by the pandemic. Of all the wrecking ball implications of Covid-19 on brands, the impact on higher education is one of the most dramatic. And as…
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“The way you allocate your media spend, where you put your ads, talks about your company. We moved from brand safety to, I think, societal safety.” This is the perspective of Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), in response to the growing Facebook ad boycott by big brands. WFA members represent 90% of global marketing communication…
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“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This was Mike Tyson’s famous response when asked by a reporter if he was worried about Evander Holyfield’s boxing fight plan. I think it also applies to the best laid 2020 strategic marketing plans. Mark Ritson shared in an insightful MarketingWeek webinar that brands now find themselves in…
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“Zoom fatigue has me wanting a landline and a rotary phone,” Tammy Sun, Founder and CEO of Carrot, shared recently. Tammy spends 9 out of every 10 conversations on Zoom, 6 days a week. All meetings have started to default to video conferencing. As have family reunions, happy hours, workouts, webinars, and just about every other social interaction. Zoom has…
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”Now is not the time to be silent, neither is it the time to jump on a bandwagon. It’s a time for real reflection and care with regards to how a brand and its leaders stand by the black community at this time and move forward with real steps to end racism and injustice globally and not only on the…
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As more marketers jump on the TikTok bandwagon, Melissa Eshaghbeigi, strategist at design agency Jam3, observed: “It’s possible for you to create that brand moment you’re looking for, but it’s also possible that you’ll cause a cringe reaction from everyone watching.” TikTok is catnip for marketing plans right now: record app downloads, access to Generation Z, high engagement, and people…
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A cafe in northeast Germany implemented a quirky new policy to encourage physical distancing as they re-open. Cafe & Konditorei Rothe is asking customers to put on colorful hats made out of swimming pool noodles that stick out several feet in all directions. I think the image of customers wearing swimming pool noodle hats is emblematic of “business as unusual.”…
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Brené Brown once gave a talk that explained the difference between empathy and sympathy: “Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection … Empathy is I’m feeling with you. Sympathy, I’m feeling for you.” I see that empathy/sympathy divide in how organizations are choosing to communicate right now. A time of crisis is when it’s most important to show empathy and fuel…
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I’ve been thinking lately about Scott Brinker’s observation back in 2013 that “technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically.” Scott was referring specifically to marketing technology (and dubbed this conundrum as “Martec’s Law”) but I think this observation also rings true for the time that we’re working now more generally. As Scott later said: “In my opinion, Martec’s Law encapsulates…
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Someone named Microsoft Sam recently compiled a selection of current advertisements into one three-minute montage titled: “Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same.” The video highlights eerily similar copy, music, and visuals across all the ads, spanning automotive to tech to retail. As Microsoft Sam observed in the video liner notes: “Since they can’t film a new ad because of…
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Supply chain software firm BlueYonder recently found that 87% of consumers faced out-of-stocks at their grocery store. A related survey from eMeals reported that shoppers are unable to find 40% of grocery items on their shopping lists. A supply-constrained climate like this challenges how brands are perceived, evaluated and valued. Shopkick found 85% of consumers say brand names do not…
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My cartoon last week on the COVID-19 digital transformation wrecking ball seems to have touched a nerve. That cartoon was shared and licensed more than just about any cartoon I’ve created in the last 18 years (nearly as widely as this other cartoon I drew on digital transformation in 2018). Organizations are all feeling the sudden and increased urgency of…
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