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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United recently announced that it’s joining Delta and American in creating a new Basic Economy fare class, one tier below Standard Economy. This no-frills tier cuts a few of the remaining “frills” of Standard Economy, like overhead bins and pre-assigned seats. It’s a move to help the major airlines compete with discount airlines like Spirit and Frontier. Spirit advertises itself…
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“A lot of direct marketing activity is retrospective; it’s about trying to replicate the past. With predictive analytics, you’re being proactive. It can turn the tables,” Simon Kaffel at HSBC said recently in a MarketingWeek article, touching on the excitement many marketers feel about the promise of predictive analytics. Predictive analytics is the use of data mining, statistics, machine learning,…
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Marketers have more customer insights at their disposal than ever. Buyer Personas can be one useful tool to turn this customer data into a story. They can help capture an abstract target audience as a tangible character sketch. But buyer personas are only as useful as what they help you to do. Marketers can get carried away with the fiction.…
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I originally drew a version of this cartoon back in 2005 and it’s still one of my more frequently licensed and referenced cartoons. I wanted to redraw it in color and because my drawing style has evolved. Brand loyalty is more fickle than many marketers imagine it. Marketers often overestimate the role of consumer brands in consumers’ lives. In the…
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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.
When James Thompson started his job as Diageo CMO, he tallied the number of presentation slides he was exposed to in his first two months of meetings. The final count — more than 12,000. I read in AdAge that he started a PowerPoint ban in some Diageo meetings to “just talk to me please” and help convey that the team…
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I recently hit the six-year anniversary of leaving my job to start Marketoonist full-time. It was the culmination of a childhood dream to become a cartoonist. It came after drawing a weekly cartoon for ten years, dreaming of the point when I could do it full-time. Five years ago, I gave a talk about making that leap at the Do…
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“It is not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it is about marketing effectively in a digital world.” I really like this quote from Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes. It keeps the technology in perspective, relative to the consumer. It puts the onus on everyone, not just those with digital in their job title. In contrast, many organizations treat it as “doing digital.”…
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We can’t break through the clutter by adding to it. TrackMaven analyzed 50 million pieces of content in 2015 and reported that output of content per brand increased 35 percent per channel in 2015, but content engagement decreased by 17 percent. As they summarized: “This is content overload, quantified. As more content floods social networks, the slice of engagement for…
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The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 debacle is a master class in how not to handle a crisis. Much will be investigated in the months ahead. But what I find particularly interesting is how Samsung communicated what was happening at each stage of the crisis. This weekend, the US DOT banned the Galaxy Note 7 on all US flights, categorizing the…
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It’s an age-old decision point in marketing — work with a range of specialized agencies, or find a full-service agency that can handle everything. In the last couple years, we’ve seen an ever-expanding tick-box approach to agency services. This decision point has only gotten more complicated. In the late-90’s, I joined one of the first digital agencies in the Bay…
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Marketing is more measurable than ever. But many of those measurements come from black boxes that marketers don’t fully understand. The WSJ recently revealed that Facebook had been overstating a key video ad metric for two years. Facebook informed ad buying agency Publicis that the earlier metric overestimated time spent watching Facebook videos by 60 – 80%. The issue was…
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The Internet of Things is coming soon to consumer packaged goods. Pernod Ricard introduced a pilot last month with 40,000 bottles of Malibu rum, turned into “digital touchpoints” with an NFC chip. The bottles connect wirelessly to your phone, providing exclusive content like drinks recipes and prize draws. As marketing manager Jo Alexander put it: “We have identified an opportunity…
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Marketers have more data at their disposal than ever. But it still feel’s like a giant game of “Where’s Waldo” in determining where customers are in the customer journey. And deciding what messages to share at any point in time. In many ways, we currently have the worst of both worlds. Customers know (and in some cases resent) that their…
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Most brands have some form of newsletter to connect with customers. But for many brands, more emphasis is placed on getting people to sign up than on giving them a reason to sign up. Last week David Hieatt, founder of Hiut Denim and the Do Lectures gave a workshop in London on the power of the humble email newsletter. I…
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The marketing world is buzzing about P&G’s announcement last month that they’re moving away from Facebook ads that target specific consumers. As CMO Marc Pritchard described the move, “We targeted too much, and we went too narrow. And now we’re looking at: What is the best way to get the most reach but also the right precision.” Coming from the…
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The Pokemon Go phenomenon may have peaked, but it sure lit a fuse for marketers to think about augmented reality, location-based marketing, and how their brands might fit in. As with adopting any other technology for marketing, many marketers will treat it as a gimmicky bandwagon. I stumbled across an AdAge article with an interesting insight on why Pokemon Go…
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There has been an explosion in purpose-driven brand communication the last few years. As Matthew Gardner at Droga5 put it, “Because of the challenge for people’s attention, purpose is the only thing that will get brands to break through. This is not a trend but more of an imperative and should be top of mind for every company.” When every…
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Marketers often think of their communication plan as three distinct types of media: Paid (buying ads), Owned (creating branded content), and Earned (social and word of mouth) Media. This P.O.E.M. model can be a handy way to think about marketing. But in practice, there are increasingly blurred lines between Paid, Owned, and Earned Media. And marketers sometimes act as if…
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“For many people the first interaction they have with a company is via a sterile, lifeless lead gen ad that takes you to a prison landing page where you are forced to enter in your life’s information and you know you will get immediately called by an overbearing sales rep before you are ready to have that conversation.” This was…
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