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
From data plans to toothpaste to headache medicine, most categories operate as if more choice is better than less choice. But if you’re actually a shopper with a headache in a headache medicine aisle, the only thing a complicated product assortment will do is make your headache worse. As Scott Galloway put it recently (echoing Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, The…
Read More
Psychographics are back in the news as part of the US election cycle, four years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal made the term mainstream. This week, CB Insights published a useful primer on psychographics, which they describe as one of the “dark arts” of social media and internet marketing. Yet psychographics are nothing new; they were first developed in the…
Read More
I once heard Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah advise businesses, “Don’t make your process my problem. Solve for my success, not your systems.” Six months into the pandemic, this strikes me as good advice for brands to think about their COVID response as well. Many businesses continue to follow the same stock script using COVID as an excuse for all…
Read More
I’ve been re-reading the 1983 classic, “Ogilvy on Advertising” to see how much has changed — and how much has remained the same — in advertising over the years. One constant is the challenge of how to measure sales impact in advertising, and the tension of long-term brand building versus short-term direct response. As David Ogilvy wrote (more than a…
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.
A recent survey from Blind found that 83% of marketing and communications professionals are reporting burnout, the highest of any job function. There are likely many factors at play, but I wonder how much of this burnout relates to productivity anxiety, the pressure to be busy, and the hustle culture in business. The pursuit of constant productivity can actually…
Read More
This cartoon is dedicated to Comcast, the most recent company to show me how far we have to go before we reach conversational AI that can come close to a human voice. The only thing worse than the Comcast customer service bot that greeted me when trying to resolve a technical issue was having to have identical conversations with the…
Read More
A Gartner study recently reported that more than half (57%) of CMOs expect to see a return to business as usual in the next 18-24 months. It made me think about what “business as usual” even means right now. Some aspects of how we work have changed so fundamentally, it’s hard to imagine that some of these changes aren’t permanent. …
Read More
We are never finished with digital transformation. In the late 90’s, I worked as a project manager helping build early web sites. For many of the companies I worked with, this was their first-ever web site. One of my clients was a regional airline based in Milwaukee called Midwest Express. I remember big hoopla to celebrate when their web…
Read More
Brand safety has been high on marketers’ agendas since the 2017 YouTube crisis, when some advertisers found their ads next to terrorist videos. Yet the blunt tool response that followed has brought its own problems. Many brands started addressing brand safety with overly broad keyword blocklists that can penalize legitimate content and make it harder to find audiences, limiting reach…
Read More
“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again,” Justin Trudeau famously said in his 2018 speech at Davos. Of course that was two years before COVID-19 changed and accelerated everyone’s plans beyond recognition. A recent McKinsey report chronicled a few examples of organizations making heroic overnight changes in the last…
Read More
COVID-19 is drawing fresh attention to the promise of customer experience management (and all its ancillary marketing buzzwords shown in this cartoon). Yet there’s still a yawning gap between the shiny promise of technology to deliver a better customer experience and the old-fashioned analog organizational limitations that hold back that potential. Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, recently…
Read More
“Universities are no longer nonprofits, but the highest-gross-margin luxury brands in the world,” NYU Professor Scott Galloway wrote recently. Professor Galloway has been exploring the crisis of higher education in the U.S. lately, accelerated by the pandemic. Of all the wrecking ball implications of Covid-19 on brands, the impact on higher education is one of the most dramatic. And as…
Read More
“The way you allocate your media spend, where you put your ads, talks about your company. We moved from brand safety to, I think, societal safety.” This is the perspective of Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), in response to the growing Facebook ad boycott by big brands. WFA members represent 90% of global marketing communication…
Read More
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This was Mike Tyson’s famous response when asked by a reporter if he was worried about Evander Holyfield’s boxing fight plan. I think it also applies to the best laid 2020 strategic marketing plans. Mark Ritson shared in an insightful MarketingWeek webinar that brands now find themselves in…
Read More
“Zoom fatigue has me wanting a landline and a rotary phone,” Tammy Sun, Founder and CEO of Carrot, shared recently. Tammy spends 9 out of every 10 conversations on Zoom, 6 days a week. All meetings have started to default to video conferencing. As have family reunions, happy hours, workouts, webinars, and just about every other social interaction. Zoom has…
Read More
”Now is not the time to be silent, neither is it the time to jump on a bandwagon. It’s a time for real reflection and care with regards to how a brand and its leaders stand by the black community at this time and move forward with real steps to end racism and injustice globally and not only on the…
Read More
As more marketers jump on the TikTok bandwagon, Melissa Eshaghbeigi, strategist at design agency Jam3, observed: “It’s possible for you to create that brand moment you’re looking for, but it’s also possible that you’ll cause a cringe reaction from everyone watching.” TikTok is catnip for marketing plans right now: record app downloads, access to Generation Z, high engagement, and people…
Read More
A cafe in northeast Germany implemented a quirky new policy to encourage physical distancing as they re-open. Cafe & Konditorei Rothe is asking customers to put on colorful hats made out of swimming pool noodles that stick out several feet in all directions. I think the image of customers wearing swimming pool noodle hats is emblematic of “business as unusual.”…
Read More
Brené Brown once gave a talk that explained the difference between empathy and sympathy: “Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection … Empathy is I’m feeling with you. Sympathy, I’m feeling for you.” I see that empathy/sympathy divide in how organizations are choosing to communicate right now. A time of crisis is when it’s most important to show empathy and fuel…
Read More
I’ve been thinking lately about Scott Brinker’s observation back in 2013 that “technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically.” Scott was referring specifically to marketing technology (and dubbed this conundrum as “Martec’s Law”) but I think this observation also rings true for the time that we’re working now more generally. As Scott later said: “In my opinion, Martec’s Law encapsulates…
Read More