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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My AI Mad Libs cartoon last week on urgency without clarity in AI strategy was one of my most licensed cartoons from the last 24 years. It got me thinking of the trickle-down effects of muddled strategy through an organization. Whenever there’s ill-defined strategy at the top, there will be poor alignment all the way down. This is particularly true…
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We’re in a strange time of urgency without clarity in AI adoption. The pressure is on to adopt everything everywhere all at once. A case in point is agentic AI. Suddenly the term “agentic” is used indiscriminately in everything from strategy decks to marketing copy. Even simple chatbots are being called agents. The pace seems driven by hype and panic…
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A few year ago, Mark Ritson wrote a handy guide to creating a marketing plan and critiqued those who make “PowerPoint decks by the yard.” Mark wrote: “Most marketing plans are PowerPoint presentations. Nothing wrong with that. But they are just too damned long – 50, 100, 200 slides in a plan. This is a shithouse way to present anything.…
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Super Bowl ads have always juggled story power and star power. But the overall swing toward celebrities has been an ongoing trend. In 2010, just 31% of Super Bowl ads included a famous face. Last year, a whopping 68% of Super Bowl ads featured celebrities and 51% featured multiple celebrities, according to iSpot.tv and EMARKETER. (I haven’t seen the final…
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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.
Steve Jobs famously described the computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Last week, my old friend Jason Copeland invited me to join a Silicon Valley roundtable he moderated with a fascinating topic: “Will AI be a bicycle for the mind? Or an autopilot to which we passively delegate human judgment and creativity? “We’re biologically hardwired to adopt tools that…
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Marketers use have long used 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. A software engineer named Alan Cooper is credited with creating the first persona in 1985. Looking for a better way to…
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Many organizations use some form of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end. Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. By design, the innovation funnel leads…
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I recently spoke at a conference with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, and he shared a fascinating insight about the influence of ad platforms on how we think about marketing. Rory said that many of the metrics that marketers chase are not designed to serve the brand. They’re designed to serve the platforms that provide those metrics. Rory coined…
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There’s an old search engine joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results. When search engines are the primary mode of finding information, brands do everything they can to be on the first page. That includes SEO tactics to become one of the ten blue links as well as sponsored ads…
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My friend Ann Handley once described my cartoons as a type of diary, which rings true to me. Since 2002, I’ve drawn this cartoon series as a kind of open diary to help make sense of whatever I’m noticing around me. As we wrap up 2025, here are some of my personal favorite diary moments from this past year. Not…
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Businesses have never had greater and more varied data at their disposal. But the stubborn issue of data silos continues to plague what they can do with it. AI alone can’t fix this. AI is only as useful as the quality of the data that it has access to. And all the hype and promise of agentic AI will run…
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I originally drew a version of this cartoon before the AI boom. ChatGPT launched three years ago this week, and completely changed the trajectory of the decade. (The original panel I drew for the 2020s involved the metaverse, which already seems so dated.) It’s a good reminder things are always in flux in marketing. And yet, the more things change,…
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The algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away. When Facebook first introduced the News Feed in 2006, posts appeared in chronological order. In 2009, they introduced their first algorithm to sort based on popularity. LinkedIn introduced an algorithmic feed in 2012, Twitter in 2014, and Instagram in 2016. All the algorithms continue to change and evolve, impacting what gets seen.…
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One of the most popular cartoons I ever drew was about the Internet of Things, right after Google announced the acquisition of Nest in early 2014. “I think my Nest smoke alarm is going off,” one character tells another. “Google Adwords just pitched me a fire extinguisher and an offer for temporary housing.” iRobot later proved that truth is stranger…
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In 2000, there was an influential experiment on the paradox of choice. Columbia and Stanford psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up two displays of jam jars at a grocery story. One display featured 24 jam varieties and the other only six. The result, as Barry Schwartz famously chronicled his 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice,” was a revelation.…
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GenAI prompts are getting pushier. From productivity apps to search to social media, users have to navigate a constant array of pop-ups, tooltips, and moving icons pushing GenAI features for just about every task. And yet the result is not automatically better output or higher productivity. BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab recently published research in the Harvard Business…
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There has long been a chasm between B2C and B2B marketing. At an event recently, I was asked about humor in marketing, and whether it was more appropriate for B2C than B2B. Part of my answer was that humor could be even more effective in B2B marketing because the bar is so low. B2B marketing is often mocked as Boring-to-Boring.…
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Recently I was nearly defeated by a restaurant mobile website. I somehow managed to fail a THIRD visual CAPTCHA puzzle asking me to identify something in a blurry image grid before I could order a burrito. The next day, I chuckled at a news story describing a ChatGPT Agent that casually and successfully passed CAPTCHA as it narrated: “Now I’ll…
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In the early 1900s, Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In a way, Wanamaker is the grandfather of marketing attribution — the science of giving credit to each marketing touchpoint that a customer was exposed to before a purchase. More than ever, marketers…
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Following my cartoon last month on the content firehose, I was struck by this comment from Albi Pagenstert, head of brand for BMW North America: “Authenticity is the new disruption. At a time when everyone’s using AI to simulate something that looks and feels real, being genuine actually stands out.” Albi was describing the brief behind their new ad that…
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