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
More Details Here
Are your buyer personas saying more about the marketing team than about the buyer? It can be difficult to wade through all of the insights that marketers collect on their customers. Buyer personas are a tool to give customer profiles a human face. They synthesize all of the observations, insights, and data into a fictionalized character sketch. Buyer personas can…
Read More
“Ambushes done right can deliver instant fame and talk value, but the unpredictability of catching lightning in a bottle is not suited for everyone or every brand,” Innocean’s Eric Springer said in a recent Adweek article called “How to Win the Super Bowl Without Spending $5 Million on a 30-Second Spot.” With Super Bowl ads fetching a record $5 million…
Read More
Marketers are increasingly eyeing Tinder, the dating and hookup app, as a potential advertising platform. With 50 million users and 1 billion-plus swipes, the numbers are attractive, particularly to reach Millennials. And as Brian Norgard, VP of Advertising at Tinder, put it, “If you think about the way Tinder works, with ‘like’ and ‘pass’, we have a really amazing signal…
Read More
Considering that clients and agencies both work in communication, it’s amazing how dysfunctional they can be at communicating with each other. This is particularly clear in the creative process, from the brief to the creative review. A creative execution is only as good as the relationship between the creative partners that produce that execution. How we show up to the…
Read More
“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 generation doesn’t dislike brands. What they don’t like is advertising.” Erin McPherson from Maker Studios said this about about Millennials at an IAB event last year. She continued, “The new authority is authenticity.” We frequently hear that “authenticity” is the key to marketing to millennials. It’s an amorphous term that has led many brands adding words like “honest” and…
Read More
It’s tempting to look at any new marketing trend as a cure-all. It’s just as tempting to completely give up on that trend when it doesn’t immediately live up to all of the hype. Gartner created a model called the Hype Cycle to track any emerging technology as it goes from hero to zero and then ultimately somewhere in between.…
Read More
It’s the time of year to make vague resolutions that we’ll forget by February. According to Statistic Brain, 45% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions and only 8% of those are actually successful. I think marketing teams often follow the same pattern. We start off the year with big ideas and good intentions and then get distracted. It’s easy to…
Read More
In the early 1900s, Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker famously quipped, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In a way, he’s 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 are…
Read More
The New York Times ran an article last week on digital ad formats that are technologically designed to be annoying: “Ads pop up and play automatically, daring readers to shut them down with feats of fine motor control. The ads commandeer the screen. They expand and contract. They cover the text and refuse to budge. “And then there is the…
Read More
Marketing has always been prone to lingo that many people don’t understand. But in the world of digital marketing, it feels like we’re getting into “emperor has no clothes” territory. A friend told me recently about sitting in a marketing plan where everyone nodded along in agreement to a stream of digital marketing buzzwords. It later became clear that many…
Read More
Advertising can’t break through the clutter by adding to it. Yet marketers often treat media as an arms race. With the rise of digital, marketers have never had more tools in their arsenal. Getting consumer attention is often referred to as “capturing eyeballs” as if impressions are the only goal. At the same time, consumers have never had more power…
Read More
When Meerkat and Periscope debuted as the next big thing at SXSW earlier this year, marketers started salivating over the potential of live streaming video. As with any new technology, some of the earliest use cases were pretty mundane. One of the first trending events on Periscope was #showusyourfridge, which involved people live streaming the contents of their refrigerators. Like…
Read More
Content marketing is everywhere. The latest content marketing studies from CMI and MarketingProfs cite that 86% of B2B marketers (76% of B2C marketers) use content marketing, 28% of marketing budgets are allocated to it, and 51% plan to increase spending on it. Yet in the rush to become publishers, I think brands sometimes neglect the importance of being editors. Many…
Read More
The average click through rate of a banner ad is 0.06%, which I’ve heard described as lower than the average failure rate of birth control. In the vein of my last post on Ad Blockers, I stumbled across a fascinating HBR article from Joe McCambley, one of the creators of the very first banner ad in 1994. That banner ad,…
Read More
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers: “We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost…
Read More
Abraham Maslow said in 1966, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This concept of “Maslow’s hammer” means to overly rely on a familiar tool. This cartoon was inspired from an insight I heard from a CMO at a CPG company. He talked about…
Read More
“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute,” according to Will Rogers. Or as Warren Buffet put it, “A great reputation is like virginity – it can be preserved but it can’t be restored.” Volkswagen’s emissions debacle has been the biggest proof point of this principle in marketing. VW is one…
Read More
I’m speaking at a Google conference on mobile marketing this week and came across their recent study on the shift to mobile and what it means for brands. This takeaway jumped out at me: “People are more loyal to their need in the moment than to any particular brand.” The insight may sound obvious, but marketers don’t naturally operate that…
Read More
If last week’s cartoon was about dysfunctional creative briefs, this week’s cartoon is about dysfunctional creative reviews. Many organizations take a “too many cooks” approach when assessing creative. Everyone has an opinion, and creative communication can be subjective. If you try to accommodate everyone, you’ll end up with the lowest common denominator. I think that how we set the stage…
Read More
Sometimes our marketing instincts get in the way of what’s most likely to be shared. When putting together a creative brief, marketers often take a tick box or laundry list approach. We throw in everything including the kitchen sink. We’re then surprised when it doesn’t land with our audience. I gave a talk recently to a room full of agencies…
Read More