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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It’s inevitable. As soon as a new social platform starts to attract an audience, brands will follow — sometimes with awkward attempts to “authentically” engage that audience. It can be a tricky dance for marketers when part of the appeal of a platform is the absence of brands. The latest social network wunderkind is BeReal, which was created as a…
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Ad exec Dave Trott once pointed out the dictionary definition of “content” to unpack his distaste for that term in marketing: “Content (noun): everything that is inside a container; the contents of a box.” “So there it is: we’re in the shipping business. That’s what happened to what we used to call ‘the idea.’ The idea has become whatever goes…
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Rutgers professor Shagun Jhaver coined the term “algorithmic anxiety” while researching Airbnb hosts in 2018. He observed the obsessive lengths that hosts were taking to try to boost the rankings of their properties — while not quite sure how the Airbnb algorithm worked or what would make a difference. Shagun described many of these attempts as “folk theories”, like…
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Nike CEO John Donahoe recently gushed about Generation Alpha, the under 12 demographic that comes after Gen Z: “The way most companies look at consumers is ‘well, who’s got disposable income?’ We don’t look at it that way. We look at, who is setting the agenda? Who is the future?” Many marketers are starting to jump on the Gen Alpha…
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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.
A couple years ago, Accenture found that only a third of businesses trust their data enough to use it effectively. Only 27% reported that their data and analytics produce insights and recommendations that are highly actionable. They identified a widening chasm between the amount of data and the value derived from it. They called it the “Data Value Gap.” Some…
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In 2018, WSJ columnist Christopher Mims observed: “Alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you can now add another inalienable right: two-day shipping on practically everything.” This was before Amazon Prime pushed the stakes further to one-day shipping in 2019, expanded even further this year to same-day shipping for 140 metro areas, and announced its Prime Air drone delivery…
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David Ogilvy famously said: “Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.” That observation from the Mad Men era still rings true today. The inherent dynamic of committees to to sand the edges. That’s the path of least resistance. Yet…
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One of the customer experience legacies of the pandemic is the QR code. From ordering in restaurants to finding product info in stores to getting help while traveling, the QR code is now ever-present in our daily customer interactions. Once dismissed as niche, the QR code is gaining steam. Scanning increased 25% in 2020, 15% last year, and is predicted…
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An entrepreneur friend of mine shared that one of the most invariable (and overused) questions he gets asked is what the “moats” are for his start-up. He described the question as a crutch that VCs go to when they don’t know what other questions to ask. As my friend put it: “More troubling is that they are looking for…
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Most organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end. Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. If we’re not careful, the innovation…
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In a volatile business environment like this, there’s often pressure to shift gears (and budgets) from long-term brand building to short-term performance marketing that drive quick sales. I recently re-read Tom Roach’s excellent 2020 essay called “The Wrong and the Short of it.” His piece goes after one of the classic “false choices” in marketing — a binary decision between…
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Unilever is the latest major company to rename the Chief Marketing Officer. Having added the word “Digital” in 2019 as “Chief Digital and Marketing Officer”, they got rid of the word “Marketing” altogether last month to announce the role as “Chief Digital and Commercial Officer.” Announcing her new role, Unilever CDCO Connie Braams said: “And no, before you ask, we’re…
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“The number of walled gardens is growing and we can only expect their walls to get higher,” Quantcast VP Mark White observed recently. “Walled gardens” as a business concept describing a closed tech ecosystem is nothing new. John Malone is credited with coining the term in the 90s to apply the world of telecom. But walled gardens are increasingly the…
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A CB Insights study found that 35% of startups failed because they launched a product with no market need. It’s one of the main reasons cited why startups fail. As Sean Ellis, founding Dropbox marketer and “Hacking Growth” author, put it: “Scaling growth before having product/market fit is the fastest way to kill your startup.” Finding product/market fit (PMF)…
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No one knows exactly what form the internet of the future will take, but the frustrations of the current internet won’t automatically go away with new technology. With all the hype and investment in the metaverse, marketers are naturally questioning how big a deal the metaverse will be for brands. Here’s a prediction I found interesting from Jane Lacher,…
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Baymard Institute reports that 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned. High cart abandonment rates are a headache for any marketer in charge of e-commerce sales. Some cart abandonment is simply the nature of omnichannel shopping — the complexity of shifting between web sites and physical stores as a consumer does research in one place and buys in another.…
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“Loyalty programs need to be treated as a trade-off, meaning they need to provide something of value to the customer and in return customers will provide their personal information along with the permission to track their shopping behavior and actions providing that Big Data.” This is a good reminder from Andy Wood, MD at GI Insight. With the death of…
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The power of user-generated content (UGC) in marketing is nothing new, but the lightbulb went on for many brands in 2020 when Nathan Apodaca’s truck broke down on the way to work. He grabbed a longboard and recorded a 23-second TikTok video of himself skateboarding to work while listening to Dreams from Fleetwood Mac and drinking from a bottle…
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“Children today are not only digital natives, they’re AI natives.” I was struck by this observation by Cynthia Breazeal, MIT professor and founder of RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education). Artificial intelligence is impacting every walk of business life. And yet, as with most sea changes in technology, your mileage may vary. A study from BCG Gamma found…
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Last week I got ready to share a weekly cartoon I drew on some marketing topic, and it just didn’t seem to matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. So I took a pause. Two days ago, I lost someone close to me, and my original topic seemed to matter even less. I don’t generally share my…
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