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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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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“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.
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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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