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
More Details Here
There’s a perennial search for the next big thing in marketing, which can distract us from getting the basics right. I recently re-discovered “Eat Your Greens”, a thought-provoking collection of essays by marketing thinkers, edited by Wiemer Snijder in 2018 (he kindly peppered a few of my cartoons between the essays). The book includes a sharp piece by Mark Ritson…
Read More
Epoch Strategy Director Alex Murrell wrote a fascinating piece a couple years ago on “The Ageism in Advertising” and the knee-jerk way that marketers obsess over younger generations. Alex cited that only 5% of advertising spend is targeted to adults aged 35-64, despite the fact that over 50s hold 80% of the wealth (in the UK), make up 60% of…
Read More
Last year, Professor Scott Galloway described COVID-19 as “an accelerant” not a “change agent.” As he later expanded: “The pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant. While it will initiate some changes and alter the direction of some trends, the pandemic’s primary effect has been to accelerate dynamics already present in society – from e-commerce to online education…
Read More
A couple months after NFTs caught the public imagination with the $69 million auction of a JPEG, it has been fascinating to see how brands have scrambled to jump on the NFT bandwagon. As Cathy Hackl put it, “everyone is talking about NFTs, and few people actually understand them.” In the luxury world, brands like Gucci and RTFKT created NFTs…
Read More
“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.
The design thinking methodology, pioneered and evangelized by fabled design firm IDEO, has spread from products to services to just about anything in business. “Design Thinking” has joined the corporate lexicon in a similar fashion as “Agile”. It means different things to different people and, too often, is used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative…
Read More
In 2015, the ANA surveyed advertisers and agencies to identify problems in the often dysfunctional client/agency relationship. One issue rose to the top — the creative brief. The ANA found that 58% of clients believe they do a good job with creative briefs. Yet only 27% of agencies agree (and 0% “strongly agree”). This gap in perception between those giving…
Read More
Last year PwC investigated where the money goes in digital advertising, at the behest of the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA). This wasn’t an easy task, as a single programmatic ad placement can involve 20 different players, each taking a cut. PwC found that a whopping half (49%) of digital ad spending is syphoned off before it reaches publishers. …
Read More
Market research firm Statista reported that the global shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers in 2020 was 88%. This is driven by a number of factors, but friction in customer experience plays a big role. One study pegged that a quarter of people abandoned shopping carts because the checkout process was too complicated. That friction happens sometimes by…
Read More
Adland is counting down to the end of third-party cookies by 2022, which has major implications for marketers. Some of the digital ad industry is working on alternative techniques to track people. A few of these techniques could be even more invasive than cookies, like tying people to email addresses (permanent) instead of advertising IDs (temporary). As Gartner analyst…
Read More
I’m struck by an observation this week from Alison Hanrahan, Head of Marketing Performance at HSBC: “As marketers we have to be careful not to settle for campaign metrics … we have to push for business outcomes.” As marketing has grown more siloed and specialized over the years, marketing activities are too often decoupled from business impact. There’s no shortage…
Read More
There’s a constant tendency in the marketing community to throw out long-established marketing concepts in favor of something new. The classic “4Ps” (Product, Price, Promotion, Place) is often in the crosshairs, sometimes with new Ps like “Purpose”, “People”, “Process”, “Performance”, or “Personalization” thrown haphazardly into the marketing mix. Mark Ritson recently mocked this behavior by launching a “Four P…
Read More
“Because it’s so new and fresh, brands seemingly have no idea what to look for when it comes to Clubhouse, they just know it’s a significant avenue that they should capitalize on.” With all the recent hype on Clubhouse, I think this observation from Jin Yu, an investor and Clubhouse influencer, captures the moment for brands. There is both urgency…
Read More
Rob Rakowitz, former head of media at Mars, once described brand safety as “a constant game of whack-a-mole.” The game has only gotten more urgent and intense in the last year. A Sizmek study found 64% of marketers struggle to implement an effective brand safety strategy. Rob now leads a task force at the World Federation of Advertising (WFA)…
Read More
EcoVeritas CEO David Harding-Brown recently observed: “Sustainability as an umbrella term is becoming meaningless; a series of macro statements that consumers can no longer relate to or engage with.” A consumer protection group called ICPEN recently found that 42% of sustainability claims made by brands online were “exaggerated, false, or deceptive.” In 1983, an undergrad named Jay Westerveld coined the…
Read More
If the only constant is change, a close second is the resistance to that change. Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine, once stumbled across an obscure article written by a Product Manager in 1959 entitled “50 Reasons Why We Cannot Change.” The Product Manager, E.F. Borisch, compiled this list while working for the Milwaukee Gear Company, and many of…
Read More
There is renewed emphasis on resilience this last year, which PwC defines as “an organization’s capacity to anticipate and react to change, not only to survive, but also to evolve.” The byword in this definition is change, and much of the focus has been on how to build a culture of agility. As literal Groundhog Day passed this last…
Read More
Rob Schwartz, CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day, recently said: “Every client conversation I’ve had these days is about who is going to be offended by this ad. There’s a lot of discussion about risk mitigation. What that tends to do is that it makes things very bland and not effective.” It’s a tricky time to work in any form of communications. Marketers…
Read More
The web has turned into an obstacle course of pop-ups upon pop-ups. No one likes pop-ups and yet there’s plenty of conversion data that designers can point at to justify them. That’s the pop-up conundrum. There’s data to show people find them annoying and there’s data to show they work. Pop-ups have become standard design practice, and yet I…
Read More
I was struck by this recent observation from Timothy Clark in his HBR article on cultivating “Intellectual Bravery”: “Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy…
Read More
Marketers are bracing for the “Cookiepocalypse” — when Google Chrome follows up on its promise to cut support for the third-party cookie by 2022. As Andrew Tu, APAC MD of OpenX, recently put it: “The upcoming death of the cookie is set up to be the defining issue of digital advertising over the next 12 months.” The writing has…
Read More