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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Marketing is full of myths, anecdotes, and long-held beliefs of what drives growth. I think part of our job as marketers is to continually question these assumptions. It’s easy for marketers to get entranced by the idea that consumers will fall in love with our brands. Former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts coined the term “Lovemark” in 2005 and…
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In my marketing career, I’ve worked on both sides of the client-agency relationship. I’ve experienced genuine strategic partnerships where the resulting work was greater than the sum of its parts and I’ve experienced dysfunctional alliances that were transactional and even combative. One of the biggest changes to the client-agency relationship in the last 15 years is the increasing role of…
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I love this statement from David Droga as he accepted Lifetime Achievement recognition at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity a week or so ago: “I used to try to sell things just on the creativity of something, and I’d be furious if they didn’t see the genius I saw. Now if I was a client, I wouldn’t want to…
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I first drew a version of this cartoon years ago sitting behind the focus group one-way mirror while working at General Mills. We held a lot of focus groups, many of them in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie. We used to jokingly refer to those focus group respondents as “The Oracles of Eden Prairie.” We seemingly brought just about…
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When digital advertising first emerged, technology seemingly offered a utopian future for marketers — the ability to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketers talked about an eventual end to one-size-fits-all advertising seen as irrelevant, interruptive, and annoying. Yet, today’s experience certainly hasn’t gotten any less annoying. Nielsen Norman Group released a study last…
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After a decade of Millennial obsession, the marketing world is increasingly buzzing about the next generation around the corner — Generation Z. Studies highlight their buying power of $44 billion, that they’ll be 40% of the population of US, Europe, and BRIC by 2020, and that they are naturally immune to advertising. Agencies are lining up to offer tools and…
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In these fast-paced days of digital marketing, there’s a continuous stream of new technologies for marketers to get excited about. It’s tempting for marketers to drop everything in favor of the shiny new thing. Our sense-checking isn’t always caught up with our enthusiasm. We risk being caught without our clothes. Or pretending like we see the clothes, when we don’t.…
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I spoke at a conference last week called MarTech, which focuses on the intersection of marketing and technology. One of their founding insights is that technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically. One of the other speakers talked about the rise of chatbots, and how they will fundamentally change marketing. The speaker shared that 80% of brands expect to be…
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I once heard Seth Godin give a talk to a group of marketers in London. After this session, someone asked his secret to being so productive. Seth not only publishes books and starts ventures, he famously finds the time to reply personally to every single email he receives. Seth replied simply, “I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to…
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Bringing ideas to life in an organization can be a bumpy ride. We’re all familiar with the myth of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree, waiting for inspiration to fall on his head. Newton’s apple is one of the more common symbols of innovation, right up there with Archimedes shouting Eureka from his bathtub. Metaphorically, that’s what we do…
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When last month’s “Communicator of the Year” can turn into this month’s PR disaster, there’s a lesson for any brand on the perils of flubbing a corporate apology. Any brand can go from hero to zero. Much has been written in the last week about the missteps of United and its CEO. Given that it was PRWeek that so recently…
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I was struck by a recent Marketing Week poll that 65% “believe older marketers are being edged out by digital natives in the job market.” The terms “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants” were coined by Marc Prensky in 2001 to define a generational divide of those born before and after the advent of digital. As technology continues to impact every…
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Native advertising is increasingly touted as the future. A new eMarketer study estimates that native advertising in the US will reach $22 billion this year, making up more than half of digital display spend. Their principle analyst Lauren Fisher concluded, “Growth of native digital display is being driven by publishers’ pursuit of higher-value and more mobile-friendly inventory, as well as…
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In content marketing, I think there can be too much emphasis on writing for search engines, and not enough on writing for people. In the mid-to-late 90’s, I worked for an early web developer and remember when search engine optimization first started gaining steam. There was suddenly a “keyword stuffing” arms race. We heard about websites that were putting completely…
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One-to-one marketing has long been considered a holy grail for business. Marketers strive to perfectly personalize the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Technology and large data pools are bringing marketers ever closer to that goal. Yet one-to-one marketing can also be, well, creepy. Marketers have to walk a fine line between useful personalization and going…
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A few years ago, Mark Schaefer mapped the supply-and-demand of content marketing and predicted diminishing returns as the volume of content grows. He called this concept “Content Shock“: “the emerging marketing epoch when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.” Since then, the volume level has only increased. TrackMaven reported that content output per…
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Many organizations have pursued Big Data as a panacea. For years, there has been an implicit strategy to capture as much data as possible and then figure out what to do with all of it later. Big Data has swelled beyond the capacity of data-driven marketers to make sense of it all. IBM estimates that 90% of the world’s data…
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Last week, I shared Marc Pritchard’s manifesto on the state of digital advertising and some of the hazards of a murky and fragmented programmatic media supply chain. One of the challenges is the uncertainty about where digital ads show up. Jaguar Land Rover temporarily halted all UK digital advertising a few weeks ago after learning that one of its ads…
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This cartoon was inspired by the talk P&G CMO Marc Pritchard gave on the state of digital advertising at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting a few weeks ago. His talk is worth reading or seeing in its entirety. Professor and pundit Mark Ritson called it the most important speech about marketing in the last 20 years. Marc Pritchard addresses the…
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In 2015, Google introduced an algorithm update known as “Mobilegeddon” that prioritized mobile-friendly websites and was a wakeup call for marketers. And yet, with customers increasingly mobile first, many brands still treat mobile visitors as mini desktop visitors. Ericcson published a neuroscience study last year that found that the stress caused by using smartphones to find content and complete tasks…
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