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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A marketing friend shared with me that one of her brand’s biggest challenges was how to stay relevant with the next generation of consumers. Many brands are having a generational identity crisis. While still obsessing over Millennials, marketing teams are also starting to retool their brands to resonate for Generation Z (whose oldest members turn 18 this year). This results…
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I heard a marketer say recently, “Publishing numbers in a powerpoint deck does not make them true.” We have never had greater access to data to make decisions. But it has also never been easier to cherry pick data to support whatever point we’re trying to make. Being data-driven in our decision making increasingly means being data-skeptical. Whether intentional or…
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Design Thinking is one of the more hyped (and frequently misunderstood) terms in business. Many companies have jumped on the Design Thinking bandwagon without really knowing what it means. The term is frequently trotted out to describe just about any organization — even organizations with a pretty superficial appreciation of Design. Sometimes the Design Thinking term gets confused with its…
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There are suddenly many more marketers trying to figure out how to resonate on Instagram. Last week Instagram opened the advertising floodgates, dropping the minimum spend and switching on an Ads API so that brands can start campaigns without talking to a rep. This is after a lengthy trial-and-error period with pilot campaigns. As so many brands rush into Instagram…
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This is one of of those rare cartoons where I didn’t have to exaggerate anything to make a situation sound ridiculous. The digital ad world has been is a state of disarray since Google shared the results of a study 18 months ago that a whopping 56.1% of display ad impressions are not even seen. And the criteria for whether…
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I heard recently that the average person checks their mobile 150 times a day. From a marketer’s perspective, that’s a lot of potential touch points — both in collecting data and in messaging. But it pales in comparison to the staggering world of wearables. Technology is giving unparalleled access for marketers to understand consumers, and to reach them in a…
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Labeling an idea polarizing can be the marketing kiss of death. Businesses often avoid ideas that are polarizing, whether new products, ad campaigns, or promotions. It’s always easier to launch the next flavor of vanilla. But there’s power in polarization. If you try to appeal to everyone, you won’t necessarily appeal to anyone in particular. In a world of clutter,…
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I originally drew a version of this cartoon back in 2006 and it’s still one of my more requested and licensed. There’s an ad agency in Australia that has a wall-sized version hanging in the room where they review creative with clients. I wanted to redraw it in color and make it easier to read. I’ve seen all of these…
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