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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A few weeks ago, NPR’s Planet Money coined a catchy new economics term — skimpflation: “We’ve all heard about rising inflation. The price of stuff is going up. And if you read this newsletter, you’ve heard of shrinkflation. That’s when the price of stuff stays the same, but the amount you get goes down. The economywide decline in service quality…
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Marketers are constantly obsessed with how to reach younger generations to stay relevant. This can lead to a lot of “cringey” marketing, to use a term my teenage daughters make fun of when older people like me use to try to speak their language. Brand teams consistently make a couple big mistakes. First, they treat generations as monolithic blocks that…
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As marketers prepare for the end of third-party cookies, it’s good to remember how inaccurate much of that third-party data is. A couple years ago, a group from MIT, GroupM, and Melbourne Business School studied the accuracy of third-party data that is regularly collected and sold by data brokers as the foundation of programmatic advertising. They looked at some of…
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Jeff Maurer, former writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, recently made a funny observation on how to deal with Slack interruptions: “You can mute notifications: Just go to ‘settings’ > ‘notifications” > ‘never get promoted’, and turn the slider to ‘on’.” I think that gets at the one of the under-appreciated factors of adopting any sort of technology…
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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.
Veteran agency planners Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler released a study this week on the state of the marketing brief as part of their Better Briefs Project. It was the first global and largest study on the topic. They found that one-third of marketing budgets is wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work. But more fascinating is the perceptual…
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“We value your privacy” is one of those meaningless marketing phrases, like “your call is very important to us” or “we’re all in this together”, where actions speak louder than words. A Deloitte survey found that 91% of US consumers consent to terms of service without reading them. For younger consumers 18-35, this was even higher, at 97%. Last year,…
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Doug Hall once said that “marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” The 2021 holiday season is a visceral reminder that the supply chain team is an integral part of the brand team. Consumers may not appreciate the myriad complicated steps that products travel in the global supply chain, but they certainly notice empty shelves and…
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Lindsey McInerney at Anheuser-Busch InBev recently gave voice to the enthusiasm many marketers are feeling for the potential of the metaverse. She said: “It’s a really exciting time to be a marketer in this space. I believe the shift we’re seeing to the metaverse, is going to be one of the largest shifts we’ve seen in a long time ……
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Marketers are perpetually looking for the most useful metrics to guide marketing decisions. None are perfect and many are in flux. Share of voice (SOV) became a marketing staple decades ago. In theory, share of voice is a simple way to compare a brand’s media spending against the total media spending of the category. The metric was bolstered by research…
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Tom Peters ushered in the age of personal branding with a 1997 cover story in Fast Company titled “The Brand Called You.” He wrote: “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To…
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I find few things as silly in the world of marketing as the classic Brand Onion. The Brand Onion goes by many names — Brand DNA, Brand Architecture, Brand Wheel, Brand Key, etc. — but it’s basically a one-page synopsis of a brand, collectively word-smithed by the marketing team. In theory, a Brand Onion is a simple tool that can…
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Last week, Facebook released a free beta for a new virtual reality meeting experience called Horizon Workrooms. Using their Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets, Facebook re-imagines the future of meetings where we’ll all show up as cartoon avatars that will mimic our movements and facial expressions. Facebook exec Mike LeBeau said: “In a virtual reality collaborative space you remember conversations…
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There’s an adage that “Marketers get tired of their advertising before consumers do.” The same is true for all aspects of a brand. A brand team spends so much time surrounded by the same old brand assets, it can be tempting to change for the sake of change. Marketers are also tempted to leave their mark on a brand the…
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When I worked on the method brand from 2006-2010, we often talked about about trying to stand out in a “sea of sameness.” Like many aisles in the grocery story, household cleaning was dominated by brands that looked and sounded alike — same stock bottle packaging, same messaging, same product benefits, same designs, same claims. There was very little differentiation…
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Media spend is rebounding in 2021 with a continued spending shift from traditional to digital channels. Zenith reported this week that digital ads will make up 58% of total ad spend in 2021, up from 48% in 2019 and 54% in 2020. A few years ago, Mark Ritson wrote an interesting article responding to research from Radiocentre and ebiquity that…
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Consumers expect personalized experiences. Yet they also grate at attempts by marketers to collect personal data about them to deliver these personalized experiences. That’s a paradox that marketers increasingly have to navigate. There’s a fine line between cool and creepy, between personalization and stalking. For years, the default mode in marketing was to collect as much consumer data as possible,…
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I was struck by this observation from Ron Carucci in his HBR article last month on returning to the office: “If the transition to WFH wasn’t challenging enough, the transition back to the office may prove even more difficult. “Our brains will be looking for familiar routines to “return” to that simply won’t be there. And when that happens, our…
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Faris Yakob wrote an interesting piece last year on what motivates consumers to buy, particularly in the few seconds a consumer spends at shelf. He wrote: “In 2005 P&G coined the term “first moment of truth” to describe the importance of packaging in their marketing model. The first point of contact is encountering an advertisement, the second is when they…
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I recently heard a marketing executive say at a conference that “to establish trust you have to appear authentic.” I found this turn of phrase interesting, and telling; she didn’t say “be” authentic — she said “appear” authentic. Influencer marketing is a large and growing part of this widespread pursuit by brands to appear more authentic. This makes the fakery…
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A recent study from the CMO Council and Deloitte found that only 17% of CMOs track Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) well. Customer Lifetime Value is a fundamental marketing tool, but it can be a bit of a guessing game, particularly when making future predictions on individuals or cohorts. Many businesses look retroactively at the ratio of CLV to CAC…
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