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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“Customers are in the midst of a trust crisis,” Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi recently observed. Citing a Salesforce study, she said “54% of customers don’t think companies operate with their best interests in mind.” Richard Edelman made a similar observation after the Edelman 2019 Brand Trust Survey published earlier this year: “Eighty-one percent say, ‘Trust in brands is an important…
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Customer engagement is often discussed purely as a technology challenge. If only brands had the right platform, the right tools and the right customer data, they would somehow build deep and meaningful relationships with their customers. But I think what sometimes gets lost is why a customer should care about having a relationship with a brand in the first place. …
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We are working in a golden age of metrics. But the explosion in available data and metrics can give us KPI tunnel vision. It can blind businesses to what’s really most important. Sky found that it was tracking more that 2,000 KPIs across their business, leading to short-termism and disjointed marketing. They eventually found a way to narrow the KPIs…
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As marketing evolves, one of the key shifts is the ability to test everything, all the time. Compared to my earliest marketing jobs in the late 90s, the tools of experimentation have been democratized and the cycle time between experiments have disappeared. We can get instant learning on just about any attribute we care to test on just about any…
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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.
The situation of this cartoon was suggested by Dan Morrill, on how organizations frequently approach new ideas. Organizations give mixed signals with innovation. There is pressure to come up with breakthrough new ideas that will push the business forward. Yet there is simultaneous resistance to any ideas that are actually breakthrough. It’s an innovation catch-22. As a result, organizations can…
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I recently rediscovered a beautiful quote from Jonathan Ive on the fragility of ideas. This was part of the tribute he delivered at Steve Jobs’ 2011 memorial: “Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.…
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According to an Appiterate survey, 71% of all app uninstalls are triggered by a push notification. And eMarketer found that the top reason (57%) US smartphone users unsubscribe from a brand’s mobile messaging is “too many messages or updates.” In the pursuit of customer experience, brands sometimes create a crappy customer experience. Constantly optimizing for engagement metrics can lead to…
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“Apple delivered exactly the iPhones everyone expected on Tuesday — and that’s kind of the problem. Instead of “one more thing,” Apple’s event was more like none more thing.” This was how Axios summarized Apple’s latest new product event earlier this month. The most notable new iPhone feature was a camera system with three cameras. Samsung had already launched a…
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This cartoon idea was suggested by Brian Fung, reacting to some interesting Google research on how even a one-second delay affects bounce rates. Google found that as page load time goes from 1s to 3s, the probability of bounce increases 32%. As it goes from 1s to 5s, the probability of bounce increases 90%. Brian questioned how much had do…
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I’ve never understood why so many brands turn the choice of unsubscribing from their newsletter into a negative brand experience. Or why purchasing a t-shirt means that the retailer assumes you want to hear from them 5 times a week for the rest of your life. It’s as old as digital marketing, but the humble email newsletter remains one of…
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Consumers increasingly look for sustainability credentials in the brands they buy. And yet, whenever brands talk about sustainability, consumers are increasingly sensitive to green-washing and hypocrisy. Google caught flak most recently for hosting a climate change summit on the coast of Sicily a few weeks ago, when it came out that over 100 of the celebrity attendees turned up…
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In an advertising shoot, we often hear someone say, “we’ll fix it in post”. It can be comforting to hear (particularly at the end of a long day), but it’s often a cop out. Marketers learn the hard way that there’s only so much that we can actually fix in post-production. Our source footage limits how much we can…
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McDonald’s is the latest company to ditch the Chief Marketing Officer role, with news that Silvia Lagnado is leaving the company and her role absorbed by restructuring. The CMO role similarly disappeared in recent years at Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Mars, Uber, Lyft, Taco Bell, Beam Suntory, Hyatt, and Coca-Cola. While 70% of the Fortune 500 still have a…
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Cheryl Calverley, CMO at UK mattress brand Eve Sleep recently observed: “We’ve reached peak performance optimization. Everyone has piled in and done the easy stuff in digital marketing … so we come back round in a circle. The only way to stand out from the crowd is creative.” I like Chery’s sentiment of “peak performance optimization”. So much of the…
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I first drew a version of this cartoon almost 10 years ago, and decided to riff on the concept with an updated version. “Make the logo bigger” is still the most common client feedback for creative work, and the quickest way to drive a creative director crazy. A web agency called New Republique once channeled their client frustration into a…
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Brand style guides are traditionally visual. When brand interactions are increasingly screenless, how do brands stand out? How do brands show their identity in a world of sound? Several brands have recently announced new sonic branding strategies in the last year, including HSBC, Coca-Cola, and MasterCard. MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar said that agencies asked if he “was smoking something” when…
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After my Cannes cartoon a couple weeks ago, I heard a lot of crazy stories on how the sausage gets made in the world of advertising. This week’s cartoon was inspired by an anecdote a reader named Mark shared with me about filming in Fiji. In another story, Hershey’s once filmed an ad in a small town in Canada that…
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“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” Jim Barksdale famously said this as the founding CEO of Netscape in the 90s. Two decades later, we’re operating in a very different data-driven world. The question is no longer “if we have data”; it’s what data are we choosing to pay…
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Marketers descend this week on the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Like SXSW and other ideas festivals, it can be inspiring to see some of the most creative work from our industry. But anytime marketers like us get together, we’re in danger of breathing our own exhaust. As inspiring as these festivals are, they potentially…
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I originally drew a version of this cartoon back in 2003 and I decided to redraw it from scratch in color. 16 years later, it’s still one of my more frequently licensed cartoons. I think that speaks to the ever-present challenge of breaking out of organizational silos. I saw a study referenced by Salesforce recently (but couldn’t find the original…
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