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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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…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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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.
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)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Twenty years ago, 17 software engineers went skiing in Utah. After bonding over their shared frustrations on the state of software development, they drafted the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The principles they defined helped change software development forever, but also inspired more widespread organizational shifts. As the signers…
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Marketers use personas as a tool to try to bring customers into the room — to help organizations be more customer-centric. They’re intended to help with everything from innovation to experience design to marketing and sales. At their best, personas can help visualize and communicate insights from research. But at their worst, they have nothing to do with the real…
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In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg famously said that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” New research this month showed that 94% of consumers are uncomfortable with how their personal data is shared online. Drew MacRae at the Financial Rights Legal Centre, said consumers’ expectations had fundamentally shifted. As he put it: “Privacy is making a comeback. People are slowly realizing…
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“If being purposeful means doing ads to you, then you’re probably doing it wrong.” I was struck by this observation from the ever-insightful Tom Roach in his essay exploring whether brand purpose is “the biggest lie the ad industry ever told.” The topic of brand purpose has always inspired some of the most absurd BS in marketing. Last week, Mondelez…
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Traditional strategic planning is often neither “strategic” nor much of a “plan”. It usually resembles a peace treaty more than clear marching orders for an organization. Strategic planning also tends to be out-dated the moment it’s written. I like this characterization from consultant Richard Gold: “Traditionally, strategic planning has been a hierarchical, top-down process where someone in the organization…
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Gapingvoid creator Hugh MacLeod once observed, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” Hugh shared this insight years before the marketing automation revolution, but the same could be said for many forms of marketing, now more than ever. Analysts at Demand Gen Report recently revealed that 60% of respondents would…
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A Capgemini study found that 75% of organizations believed themselves to be customer-centric. Only 30% of customers agreed. The numbers were even more stark for consumer products companies — 80% believed they were were customer-centric and only 14% agreed. There’s a wide gap between what customers expect and what organizations deliver. Deloitte identified one of the key CX challenges that…
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In this time of change, I’ve been thinking about the gap between a desire to change and uncertainty on where or how to change. The pandemic has been a change accelerant, but the path isn’t always clear. Jeff Bezos has some relevant insights in how he describes Day 1 versus Day 2 thinking. He first codified this idea in the…
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