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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Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the original Mini in 1959, famously said, “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” The Mini became one of the most successful cars of all time. Sir Alec was knighted is 1969 because of its success. The car was voted the second most influential car of the 20th century. The Mini became an icon…
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My new book collection has launched — Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings. You can find more detail on the book and where to buy it here (print and ebook on Amazon most places worldwide and other retailers like Barnes & Noble). Also, if you’re interested in ordering more than 50 copies…
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I just returned from a two week book tour with marketers in the UK and Norway. If there was one topic that overshadowed most marketing conversations, it was GDPR. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the sweeping new EU regulation on marketing data that will impact any company that offers goods or services to EU residents or tracks…
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Reaching the right person with the right message at the right time has long been the holy grail of marketing. The technology and data is tantalizingly close, and yet context and intent remain elusive. Personalized marketing is still wasted if it hits the wrong context and intent. Here’s how Google framed the opportunity recently: “Every day, three billion people around…
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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.
This is in the vein of my “How to Write a PowerPoint Pitch” cartoon a couple weeks ago. Presenters often apologetically refer to overly busy slides in their presentations as “eye charts”. If you ever feel compelled on-stage to apologize for showing an “eye chart”, that’s a good sign you might want to rethink your slides. When I started my…
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Marketers are increasingly excited about the potential of AI. L’Oréal chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet described a commonly shared sentiment: “I believe AI is as big a revolution as the internet itself. It’s going to power more of our interactions with our consumers, be it through advertising, CRM or even ad serving. All those compartments of marketing will be transformed…
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The surest way to stifle an idea is to write a longwinded presentation deck about it. PowerPoint, Keynote, and Prezi are powerful tools, but the power comes in how they’re used. A weighty presentation deck can get in the way of the idea itself. The classic Mark Twain quote applies equally when writing a presentation — “I didn’t have time…
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The marketing role is always evolving. Increasingly marketers are taking on P&L responsibility. CMO marketing technology spend is now rivaling CIO technology spend. Gartner reported earlier this year that 75% of marketing leaders said they own or share responsibility for the P&L. As Gartner’s Jake Sorofman said, “Over the past several years, we’ve witnessed an expansion of the CMO mandate, from…
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One of the easiest ways to gauge the culture of innovative in an organization is to see how that organization deals with failure. If unchecked, failure carries a stigma that can paralyze companies from trying new things. This summer, a Swedish clinical psychologist named Samuel West opened up a pop-up “Museum of Failure” in the town of Helsingborg. The museum…
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We need both art and science in marketing — the “MadMen” and “MathMen.” I think the most compelling campaigns of the future will bring together the greatest creativity and the greatest insight informed by data. But creatives and data scientists can make uneasy bedfellows. It’s one thing to optimize media; it’s another to optimize the creative itself. As marketing increasingly…
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Marketing creative can only be as good as the creative brief that went into it. Yet creative briefs are frequently one of the more overlooked parts of the creative process. Creative briefs are often neither creative nor brief. I like how Creative Director Howard Margulies voiced this in an AdAge article a while ago: “Too often, the creative brief is…
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Havas Media recently reported that 60% of content created by the world’s leading 1,500 brands is “just clutter,” defined as “poor, irrelevant or fails to deliver.” This conclusion was part of their annual Meaningful Brands study, which measures outcomes for brands that form “meaningful” connections with consumers. However, Havas found a 71% correlation between brands that create meaningful content and…
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“The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative,” HBS Professor Gerald Zaltman wrote in his classic textbook, How Customers Think. Years ago I took Zaltman’s class as a student and it made an impact on me. He talked about the conundrum that 80% of new products and services fail within six months of launch, usually…
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Marketing is full of myths, anecdotes, and long-held beliefs of what drives growth. I think part of our job as marketers is to continually question these assumptions. It’s easy for marketers to get entranced by the idea that consumers will fall in love with our brands. Former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts coined the term “Lovemark” in 2005 and…
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In my marketing career, I’ve worked on both sides of the client-agency relationship. I’ve experienced genuine strategic partnerships where the resulting work was greater than the sum of its parts and I’ve experienced dysfunctional alliances that were transactional and even combative. One of the biggest changes to the client-agency relationship in the last 15 years is the increasing role of…
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I love this statement from David Droga as he accepted Lifetime Achievement recognition at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity a week or so ago: “I used to try to sell things just on the creativity of something, and I’d be furious if they didn’t see the genius I saw. Now if I was a client, I wouldn’t want to…
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I first drew a version of this cartoon years ago sitting behind the focus group one-way mirror while working at General Mills. We held a lot of focus groups, many of them in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie. We used to jokingly refer to those focus group respondents as “The Oracles of Eden Prairie.” We seemingly brought just about…
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When digital advertising first emerged, technology seemingly offered a utopian future for marketers — the ability to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketers talked about an eventual end to one-size-fits-all advertising seen as irrelevant, interruptive, and annoying. Yet, today’s experience certainly hasn’t gotten any less annoying. Nielsen Norman Group released a study last…
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