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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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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“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.
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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I drew this cartoon partly in response to two studies that came out this week. They seemed to capture the mixed signals that businesses are grappling with as they look at 2023. The Deloitte “CFO Signals” report partly tracks the risk aversion of CFOs over time. Deloitte found that only 29% of CFOs say this is a good time to…
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This cartoon is a follow-up to a cartoon I drew just four years ago about a kid on Santa’s lap in a different privacy era: “Well, Timmy, if you didn’t want me to see you when you’re sleeping, know when you’re awake, know if you’ve been bad or good, and sell that data to third parties, then you should have…
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Asking for a tip is increasingly part of the customer experience. Partly because of the ubiquitous touch screens now at most points of purchase, tipping has crept to just about every type of transaction — from takeout to self-service frozen yogurt to propane refills to buying a t-shirt at a concert. Service tips of 15-30% are commonly requested before service…
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I recently heard the way marketers speak described as “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning,” which made me laugh. I think “Jargon-Monoxide” is produced by every part of a business, but marketers are particularly adept at “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning.” It’s ironic that the business discipline in charge of communications has such a hard time communicating what it does without jargon. There are multiple…
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There’s a funny conspiracy theory that the Internet secretly “died” six years ago — and is now mostly filled with bots communicating with other bots. As Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in the Atlantic last year: “‘Dead-internet theory’ suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence … “YouTube, for a time, had such high bot traffic that…
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No matter how sophisticated the tools have gotten or how rich the data, I find it funny how much of marketing and sales still rely on blunt force, one-size-fits-all lead generation tactics like these. This scattershot approach is often described as “spray and pray” — broadcasting generic messages to large groups in hopes that a small percentage will magically…
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“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a decision,” is a truism strangely popularized both by René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher, and Rush, the prog rock band. We can always analyze more data and write more decision trees, but we never have 100% confidence in how things are going to turn out after making a…
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Last Friday marked 20 years of Marketoonist. On October 21, 2002, I published my very first marketing cartoon, then called Brand Camp. It was a cartoon on the 8 Types of Brand Managers. I had just started as an Associate Marketing Manager at General Mills, working on Yoplait. I emailed this first cartoon to 35 co-workers from my cubicle on…
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There’s nothing spookier this Halloween than some of the headlines. Sapio Research recently found that a whopping 95% of global businesses are concerned about a potential recession, with 45% of US businesses “highly concerned.” Fear can drive a knee-jerk response in a recessionary environment to cut, cut, cut — marketing budgets, media spend, hiring, headcount, R&D investment. In 2010, Harvard…
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This cartoon was partly inspired by reading someone described as the MD of EMEA at VMLY&R, part of WPP. I’ve always found it funny that some of the most successful ad agencies have some of the least imaginative names. The alphabet soup names of many agencies are hard to tell apart, and could be easily mistaken for law firms. …
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Last week I wrote about the “messy, mushy middle” of figuring out where and how we work as more people return to the office. I closed with a funny observation from Andrew Mawson, MD of AWA: “People tried coming into the office and when they got there, they found all they were doing was being on Zoom calls.” Figuring out…
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The Return-to-Office versus Work-from-Home Tug of War continues. Many businesses are getting more insistent with their plans to get staff back in the office more, shifting tactics from offering perks to issuing mandates. In a study from A.Team, 53% of tech leaders said an economic downturn would make it easier to require employees to return to the office. A…
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The nature of the relationships between all the teams across client and agency has a direct impact on the work that comes out. Small areas often overlooked — like how much care is taken in writing briefs or how how much a gauntlet there is to run to get paid — can make a difference in marketing campaigns with the…
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Gary Rogers, former Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream CEO and Levi Strauss Chairman, used to encourage his teams not to obsess too much on “worm races.” “Worm races” were Gary’s nickname for line charts that showed competitive market share over time. He observed that marketers often spent too much time focused on what their competitors were doing and not enough…
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