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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“Maybe AI will help you work. But more likely, you’ll be working for AI.” Ian Bogost made this observation a few months ago in the Atlantic, and it stuck with me. As organizations scramble to incorporate AI, no one knows quite how AI will impact the future of work. Will productivity gains be offset by, as Ian Bogost put it,…
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Braze recently reported that the average smartphone user receives over 40 push notifications a day. The Atlantic pegged the daily number of push notifications even higher, between 50 and 80. Here’s how Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull categorized push notifications last week: “Push notifications may indeed be the smartphone’s defining feature. They are, if nothing else, a perfect avatar of…
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Where an ad appears can sometimes communicate more than the ad itself. Keith Browning, LinkedIn’s brand marketing global lead, shared an interesting analogy a few years ago on the relative importance of content and context. He recounted an experiment by Joshua Bell, one of the top violinists in the world. One day, Joshua stepped onto a metro stop in DC…
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Thorsten Strauss recently sent a funny observation to me that “ the Prompt Engineer is the new Growth Hacker.” The AI Prompt Engineer is suddenly an in-demand job, as organizations scramble how to work with generative AI. Insider recently reported salaries up to $375k for prompt engineers, even for those without a tech background. It’s currently a seller’s market and…
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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.
“The plural of anecdote is not data,” the old aphorism goes. I think the inverse is also interesting: “The singular of data is not anecdote.” Marcus Collins, Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York, made the following observation a couple years ago: “Though the amount of data available to marketers has increased exponentially over time, our ability to extract insight…
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This cartoon is less about focus groups than how we often use focus groups. Or really any type of market research. Years ago, I overheard some agency friends joke about “the Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Eden Prairie is a suburb of Minneapolis, where a lot of focus groups happen. These agency friends went on to describe the strange…
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In 2019, I drew a cartoon poking fun at the explosion of new podcasts, with one podcaster saying to another: “Thank you for being a podcast guest on my new podcast about podcasting for podcasters starting podcasts to podcast to other podcasters.” At that point, Apple claimed 700,000 unique podcasts on iTunes. Then came Covid. In 2020 alone, over a…
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My cartoon last week, “AI Written, AI Read”, has already become one of my more widely shared cartoons ever — nearly a million impressions on LinkedIn alone. Generative AI is clearly on a lot of our minds right now. Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, voiced the level of hype related to Generative AI at a Jasper conference recently: “I think…
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One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used ChatGPT or other AI tools at…
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There’s a counter-intuitive Buddhist line that has stuck with me: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s particularly useful in times of uncertainty or even panic, when the temptation is to follow the herd, or take action for the sake of taking action. Sometimes the best action to take on a situation is no action at all. For me,…
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In last week’s cartoon, I parodied some of my favorite clichés in marketing presentation slides. With just six panels in that cartoon, I had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. One of my other favorite used and abused slides is the ever-present framework, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow first proposed this theory in a…
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Marketing plans too often sound alike, even for completely different brands in completely different industries with completely different objectives. I’ve tried to capture a few common marketing plan slide clichés in this cartoon, but marketing plans can easily swell to hundreds of slides and appendices. They often take the form of what Garr Reynolds once dubbed the “slide-ument” — an…
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What a difference a year (or even a few months) makes. Just last January, I drew a cartoon showing a couple marketers (as legless avatars) standing in a virtual world under a banner that reads, “welcome to our brand experience in the metaverse!” One is saying to the other, “I’m sure consumers will show up ANY minute now.” The…
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Ian Whitworth recently described AI-generated content as “infinite words nobody wants.” He observed: “ChatGPT is here to make us all the same… The Great Same-ening is upon us… “ChatGPT, Jasper and all the rest are powerful conformity machines, giving you the ability to churn out Bible-length material about yourself and your business that’s exactly the same as your competitors.” That’s…
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Whenever budgets are under scrutiny, marketing is one of the first items on the chopping block. Those conversations are more difficult when marketing and finance speak a different language. One of the most important target audiences that marketers need to learn how to market to is their own CFO. I’ve always liked the brand management school of marketing training because…
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One of the most popular cartoons I ever drew was about the Internet of Things, right after Google announced the acquisition of Nest in early 2014. “I think my Nest smoke alarm is going off,” one character tells another. “Google Adwords just pitched me a fire extinguisher and an offer for temporary housing.” iRobot later proved that truth is stranger…
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Doing “more with less” is emerging as a sort of business mantra for 2023. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the term externally and internally this week to talk about the overall business climate. In a memo to staff announcing layoffs, he looked outward: “As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize…
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I’ve drawn a lot of cartoons about the tendency of marketers to want to change everything, all at once, and all the time. There’s an old marketing truism that “marketers get tired of their advertising before consumers do.” The same instinct to change for the sake of change goes for every aspect of marketing, from logos to packaging to agencies.…
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On May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote the famous “Internet Tidal Wave” internal memo at Microsoft. This was a huge wake-up call for the desktop software company at the time. It immediately shifted priorities and resources for Microsoft to go after the nascent World Wide Web. I thought of this “Internet Tidal Wave” moment when I came across a helpful…
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My last cartoon before the holidays was about playing it safe. The other extreme is complete reinvention. There’s truth in Bill Gates’ classic 1996 observation: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” Organizations can get get stuck in a rut and resist change. …
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