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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Meetings have always been a favorite punching bag of modern work life. One survey in 2014 found that employees rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.” But the shift to remote and hybrid work has strained our collective meeting culture even further. Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Report found that weekly meeting time increased 2.5X from pre-pandemic levels,…
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Gartner has been mapping the Hype Cycles of emerging technologies for nearly 30 years. Jackie Fenn (still at Gartner) originated the widely-used Hype Cycle Methodology in 1995. She later described the Hype Cycle this way: “It was really an observation we were seeing with technology … We’d see a lot of enthusiasm and overexpectation — and then a trough of…
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Computer scientists coined the colorful expression “garbage in, garbage out” in the earliest days of data processing, a term first recorded in an article in 1963 when an AP reporter visited an early computer lab. Nearly 60 years later, we’re still struggling with data credibility. A study last year from HFS Research found that 75% of execs don’t have…
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Marketers are perennially excited about the shiny new thing. Few shiny new things have captured the imagination of marketers quite like the NFT bandwagon of the last year. Of course, it’s always good to experiment with shiny new things that come along. What is fringe today could be mainstream tomorrow. But experimentation can lead to distraction. And the dynamic of…
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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.
Amid some of the hype surrounding the metaverse, I was struck by a Washington Post profile of Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, creator of Fortnite. The article included this synopsis of Tim’s vision for brands and the metaverse: “The metaverse … would be an expansive, digitized communal space where users can mingle freely with brands and one another in…
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The term “thought leadership” was first coined in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman, editor of Strategy+Business, with a narrow focus in mind. He wrote: “Thought Leaders are those people who possess a distinctively original idea, a unique point of view, or an unprecedented insight into their industry.” Since then, the meaning of thought leadership has devolved into a catch-all term that…
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Marketing has always been a little full of it and there are many forms of marketing B.S. Ironically, the more that brands push to sound “authentic”, the more these efforts can come across as fake. YUM! Brands CMO Ken Muench oversees global marketing for KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. He has a particular pet peeve about brand purpose. He…
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Mastercard gave the first glimpse of the 2021 holiday shopping season last week. In their SpendingPlus report, they found holiday spending rose 8.5% over the previous year — the biggest spending increase in 17 years and higher than their expected forecast of 7.4%. They also found that e-commerce holiday sales were up a whopping 61% over the 2019 pre-pandemic level…
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Brands from retailers to restaurants are all struggling with staffing issues in the last sprint of holiday shopping, and beyond. Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor, said: “I would say ‘labor shortage’ is kind of a tricky term because is does imply that there aren’t workers available … what we know is that there are a significant number of workers…
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Supply chain issues have become the go-to excuse for just about anything. Supply chain ripple effects are impacting every industry from restaurants to retailers. And even as some supply chain snarls are growing less severe, others have no end in sight. This week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger predicted supply challenges for semiconductors would continue through 2023. Yet supply chain excuses…
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Organizations have always struggled with making decisions. One McKinsey study found that more than half of all business time spent making decisions is ineffective. In an average Fortune 500 company, McKinsey estimated that decision paralysis cost $250 million of wasted labor costs per year. But decision paralysis is particularly acute in the face of an uncertain future. And decision making…
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Wired editor Brian Barnett suggested a few years ago that Cyber Monday is the perfect day to battle annoying marketing emails: “Today more than any other, every single marketer in possession of your email address has set their phasers to send… “Whether you’re partaking in deals this year or passing them by, take a moment to embrace the season’s true…
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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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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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