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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In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and increasingly grew frustrated by all of the product complexity he saw at review meetings. He famously shouted “Stop! This is crazy” and drew a two-by-two grid on the whiteboard. At the top of the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional” and to the left of the two rows he wrote “Desktop”…
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A few years ago, a security expert named Mikko Hyppönen set up free WiFi hotspots in the center of London. As part of the “terms of service,” Mikko put in a “Herod clause”. In exchange for WiFi, “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Several people signed up. Mikko’s point: “The…
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“Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service,” Jeff Bezos said in a Fast Company interview about Amazon last year. Similarly, Google published a 2015 study on mobile strategy that found that “people are more loyal to their need in the moment than to any particular brand.” Google calls these needs…
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There’s an influencer marketing land grab underway. Influencer posts on Instagram alone nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017. That spike was even before January’s Facebook news feed announcement. And influencer marketing is getting far more granular. Brands are increasingly focused on marketing with pools of “micro-influencers” who claim fewer than 10,000 followers and “nano-influencers” who claim fewer than 1,000 followers.…
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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.
It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer — navigating the Wild West of consumer expectations and unregulated food claims like “natural.” According to the most recent Consumer Reports Survey, 73 percent of consumers seek out foods labeled as “natural”. But, “natural” is not a legal or regulated term. The FDA signaled a few years ago that it would…
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In February 2001, a group of renegade software engineers gathered at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah and famously wrote the Agile Manifesto. They called into question the whole traditional Waterfall approach to product development and project management. The Atlantic recently profiled that gathering in an article called “The Winter Getaway That Turned the Software World Upside Down: How a…
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Voice is starting to redefine how consumers buy brands. Brands will increasingly have to navigate a world that doesn’t have a traditional user interface — zero UI. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai put it, “we will move from mobile first to an AI first world.” Walker Sands recently reported that one in five (19%) have made a voice purchase through…
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64% of Super Bowl viewers are unable to connect a memorable ad to the brand it was advertising, according to research from research consultancy Communicus. They also found less than 20% of Super Bowl ads produce significant impact on the brand. Their obvious but sometimes forgotten takeaway — entertainment alone is not enough. What they recommended marketers focus on is…
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Marketers are scrambling to figure out the implications of Facebook’s announcement in early January that it will overhaul its news feed. Updates from friends and family will be prioritized much higher than updates from brands. Facebook will emphasize “meaningful social interactions” over likes and shares. The announcement may be dramatic, but this has been a long time coming. Organic posts…
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I first played around with this cartoon idea nearly a decade ago and decided to redraw for a conference in Amsterdam last week. Organizations are designed to minimized risk. It’s in their DNA. Organizations develop all sorts of antibodies to neutralize threats to the status quo. A natural byproduct is that it can be hard to introduce unconventional ideas. As…
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I’m giving a talk this week in Amsterdam about building a culture of innovation and I stumbled across a recent innovation report from Capgemini that I found interesting. Capgemini reports that 87% of companies now have a space dedicated to innovation (a 27% increase in innovation centers versus last year). But only 17% of companies say that innovation is taking…
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A few weeks ago, a publicly traded beverage company called Long Island Iced Tea Corp changed it’s name to Long Blockchain and announced that it was focusing on blockchain technology. Their stock surged 200% on the news. Last week, Chanticleer Holdings, which owns burger restaurants and is a franchisee of Hooters, said that it was using blockchain for a new…
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’Tis the season for retargeting ads. Major shopping periods spark a surge in campaigns triggered by items consumers browse, place in their carts, or (annoyingly) have already purchased. Samuel Scott gave an interesting talk in October about the net effect of all of this retargeting. He said: “If anyone here uses retargeting, then it’s your fault that people are blocking…
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“In the age of Amazon, retailers must leverage assets that Bezos doesn’t have: When Amazon zigs, retails must zag.” This was a quote from NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway in a Fast Company report this week on “The Future of Retail in the Age of Amazon.” Some analysts are calling this era a retail apocalypse. In the US this year,…
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“There is a lot of talk about creating customer-centric organizations but not nearly enough action,” a recent Forrester report said. Forrester described 2018 as “a year of reckoning” for many businesses: “Unmet customer expectations are resulting in churn; the lack of digital transformation gains is translating to loss of market share; industry lines that protected some are crumbling; and longstanding,…
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Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for the New York Times, went to the Google I/O conference earlier this year and joked, “I have been counting occurrences of the phrase ‘now, we use machine learning’ and I got to 70 trillion.’” This has certainly been a watershed year for machine learning and the overall AI arms race, particularly in marketing technology. Salesforce…
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A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon on the Future of Advertising, imagining increasingly invasive advertising in our homes, thanks to technology and IOT. The cartoon seemed to strike a chord, and even popped up in the Wall Street Journal. And yet while advertisers are gaining increasingly powerful tools to reach consumers in ways never before possible, consumers are…
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Marketers often fall into the trap of treating generations as monoliths. The topic, “How to Appeal to Millennials”, has appeared on many a conference agenda and marketing plan, often accompanied by a stereotypical checklist of what defines a millennial mindset and what it takes for brands to resonate with them. I like how Mark Ritson frequently skewers this practice. Here’s…
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The 2002 movie “Minority Report” portrayed a futuristic vision of advertising as the lead character, John Anderton, enters a shopping mall that identifies him from retina scans and pitches personalized ads to him as he walks by: “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now.” That scene influenced a generation of marketers. I riffed on this premise with…
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