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 content marketing, I think there can be too much emphasis on writing for search engines, and not enough on writing for people. In the mid-to-late 90’s, I worked for an early web developer and remember when search engine optimization first started gaining steam. There was suddenly a “keyword stuffing” arms race. We heard about websites that were putting completely…
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One-to-one marketing has long been considered a holy grail for business. Marketers strive to perfectly personalize the right message to the right consumer at the right time. Technology and large data pools are bringing marketers ever closer to that goal. Yet one-to-one marketing can also be, well, creepy. Marketers have to walk a fine line between useful personalization and going…
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A few years ago, Mark Schaefer mapped the supply-and-demand of content marketing and predicted diminishing returns as the volume of content grows. He called this concept “Content Shock“: “the emerging marketing epoch when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.” Since then, the volume level has only increased. TrackMaven reported that content output per…
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Many organizations have pursued Big Data as a panacea. For years, there has been an implicit strategy to capture as much data as possible and then figure out what to do with all of it later. Big Data has swelled beyond the capacity of data-driven marketers to make sense of it all. IBM estimates that 90% of the world’s data…
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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.
Last week, I shared Marc Pritchard’s manifesto on the state of digital advertising and some of the hazards of a murky and fragmented programmatic media supply chain. One of the challenges is the uncertainty about where digital ads show up. Jaguar Land Rover temporarily halted all UK digital advertising a few weeks ago after learning that one of its ads…
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This cartoon was inspired by the talk P&G CMO Marc Pritchard gave on the state of digital advertising at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting a few weeks ago. His talk is worth reading or seeing in its entirety. Professor and pundit Mark Ritson called it the most important speech about marketing in the last 20 years. Marc Pritchard addresses the…
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In 2015, Google introduced an algorithm update known as “Mobilegeddon” that prioritized mobile-friendly websites and was a wakeup call for marketers. And yet, with customers increasingly mobile first, many brands still treat mobile visitors as mini desktop visitors. Ericcson published a neuroscience study last year that found that the stress caused by using smartphones to find content and complete tasks…
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Super Bowl ads are running $5 million for a 30 second spot this year, twice what they cost 10 years ago. But the ad itself is increasingly only the start. Brands are now investing an extra 25% on top of the media spend to advertise the ads they’re advertising in the Super Bowl. “There’s become more of a ‘game around…
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I’ve never understood web sites that subject visitors to a giant pop-up the moment they arrive demanding their email address. The strong-arm tactic is often used before visitors have even had a chance to read whatever article they came to read. And it’s only the starting gambit. Marketers have a whole grab-bag of passive-aggressive tricks to choose from: pop-ups, slide-ins,…
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“Customer-centric” is frequently claimed by CMO’s to describe their marketing visions. But, like many feel-good marketing buzzwords, “customer-centricity” has lost much of its meaning. Many marketers give it lip service, but there’s not a lot of alignment on how to define it, or where to start. Marketers aren’t as customer-centric as they think. For all the hype, delivering on the…
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It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer. Consumers are scrutinizing more than ever to what goes into the foods they buy. And what constitutes “healthy” to consumers is in flux. The FDA recently announced that it will be calling out “added sugar” on nutrition labels in the future. It is estimated that 68% of processed foods contain added…
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At CES this week, marketers were buzzing about the potential of virtual assistants. “Marketing is much more about providing a great experience or a product that makes a consumer’s life easier and one of the most interesting developments for our business is the virtual assistant,” said Kristin Lemkau, CMO of J.P. Morgan Chase. Most of the attention at CES was…
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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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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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