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.
Learn MoreCartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, & Doodling in Meetings
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I drew this cartoon thinking about how much panic and FOMO has been setting the pace and tenor of AI adoption. No one wants to be left behind. And that’s led to some of the most disjointed decisions we’ve seen, like banking on business growth by laying off staff and assuming AI will “automagically” fill the gap. CNBC reported that…
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This cartoon was partly inspired by the whiplash approach to AI writing at LinkedIn. A few years ago, they indiscriminately pushed AI tools, offering to draft a full post after typing just 30 words. Surprise, surprise, this resulted in a lot of AI slop on the platform. A recent study from Pangram Labs claims that 41% of long-form posts on…
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I heard somewhere years ago that the reason the classic TV remote control is so ridiculously complicated is that each button has its own product manager, lobbying hard for the features of that button. I think of that every time I stay in an Airbnb and can’t figure out how to turn on the TV. It inspired this cartoon. In…
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There’s an old joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results. For years, the name of the game was to rank as highly as possible in the top 10 blue links. Some of the game resulted in mindless keyword stuffing and other SEO hacks. But it also created a value exchange:…
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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.
I recently stumbled across Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The British economist Charles Goodhart originally framed this in a 1975 article on monetary policy, but it’s an important watch-out for business today. When we optimize for a number instead of our true goal, we risk whatever we were trying to…
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The quality of marketing leads is an age-old sales gripe. David Mamet famously captured this sentiment in the 1984 play (and 1992 movie) Glengarry Glen Ross. The leads were so bad, they became a running joke among the sales team. In 2002, B2B research firm SiriusDecisions gave the problem a framework, the Demand Waterfall, and its now ubiquitous byproduct, the…
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In 2005, I drew a cartoon with a consumer and a brand tying the knot in a wedding ceremony. In her vows, the consumer says: “And I promise to be loyal, forsaking all other brands, unless your competitor is on deal, you’re out-of-stock or you’re just not meeting my need states at the time.” That cartoon was partly inspired by…
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Around 15,000 marketers descend this week on the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. And everyone else will feel like we’re there. As Agency SOS Founder John Kovacevich wrote a few years ago: “Prepare yourselves. Your (highly-placed, senior-level, expense-account-having) advertising friends are about to flood your feed with yacht and rosé photos. Later this week, when…
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Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has long been on the frontlines of debunking marketing myths, starting with “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know” in 2010. Byron recently introduced me to the term SONK — “the Scientific-cation Of Non-Knowledge.” In an interview last year, Byron credits SONK to his mentor Andrew Ehrenberg. As Byron describes SONK: “You take trivial…
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Fake authenticity (or “faux-thenticity”) has long plagued marketing. Authenticity is set up as a sort of holy grail in branding, marked as an objective in countless creative briefs. The “origin story” in particular is a common lever to manufacture authenticity. Yet most framing of the origin story is heavily scripted, edited, and contrived. The more that a brand tries to…
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I drew this week’s cartoon on a paradox I keep seeing in innovation. Henry Ford famously said: “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.” Ford’s original motor company cribbed ideas and inspiration everywhere from Singer sewing machines to P&G to Chicago slaughterhouses. Those borrowed innovations set the stage for…
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A couple years ago, I went to the Cannes Lions, the main show for advertising. There’s a giant gallery room in the basement of the main Palais building with all the work submitted for awards. As I walked past the ads and case studies, all I could think about was how the sausage gets made. The creative “idea” usually gets…
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Former ad copywriter and Gaping Void cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once wrote, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” It’s not just advertising that can be off-putting. The way businesses talk in lead generation is generally worse, partly because there’s the illusion of personalization. AI and personalization tech have made it…
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I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by today’s content overload and the circular creator economy. When I left college in the 90s, I moved to Prague and found a job at Velvet, an English-language magazine for the booming but close-knit expat scene. At that strange time when Eastern Europe opened up, there were more than 20 different English-language newspapers and…
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A friend sent me a William Blair research report this week that characterized enterprise AI adoption as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Just about every organization has started to use AI tools in some fashion. But there’s little orchestration of how those tools are actually used. And very little alignment across the enterprise. A 2025 MIT report suggested…
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This week’s cartoon goes out to my friend Ann Handley, who has been putting up a valiant defense for the em dash (—). As Ann put it recently: “People are patrolling the streets, rounding up em dashes like it’s CSI: Grammar Unit. “Use one in a paragraph? That means you’re secretly AI! You’re generating your LinkedIn posts with a boiling…
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LinkedIn reported that the percentage of US job postings that include the term “storyteller” doubled last year from the year before. Katie Deighton recently wrote about this in the WSJ: “Marketing and technology companies have often repurposed grandiose descriptions from other arenas to lend corporate office roles additional sparkle. While the heyday of technology gurus, developer ninjas, SEO rockstars and…
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I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by some of the latest growing pains of human-AI collaboration. As AI gets more autonomous, the traditional “human in the loop” oversight model is showing strain. With pressure to “10X productivity” with fleets of AI agents, how best to keep up with the avalanche and complexity of approvals? The “human in the loop” risks…
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The marketing industry’s obsession with youth is nothing new. Thinking about what makes the next generation of consumers tick is a perennial activity. Generic one-size-fits-all advice on how to crack the code on Gen Z (age 16-29) and Gen Alpha (age 0-16) circulates constantly. Sometimes these generations are awkwardly bundled together as “Gen Zalpha.” Much of it trades in lazy…
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Almost exactly 6 years ago, as things started to shut down for Covid, I drew a cartoon about the challenges of planning in a time of uncertainty. An executive holds up a coin and says, “We need to update our forecast. Heads, this will blow over soon. Tails, it’s the end of the world.” At the time I shared a…
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