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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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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“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 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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It’s tempting for marketers to assume we intuitively know what consumers want. After all, we’re consumers too. But listening to the focus group of one inside our heads can lead us astray. Trying to extrapolate our personal experience to how an audience will respond is risky. Many leaders don’t recognize this blind spot. This is particularly common in hierarchical organizations…
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Consumers don’t spend as much time thinking about brands as marketers think they do. Marketers often operate as if their consumers are just waiting around to engage with the brand. Yet the way many brands communicate isn’t that engaging. Last year I had the opportunity to go through Instagram advertising bootcamp while consulting with a brand. The brand was one…
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This cartoon came out of a conversation with a marketer recently about the silos in her company. Her company was trying to encourage more collaboration across teams and divisions. They wrote values statements and held off-sites on the importance of cross-functional collaboration. At the same time, in the name of efficiency and cost controls, her company carefully calculated who spent…
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I drew an early version of this cartoon a few years ago and wanted to update it. Last week, I made my kids jealous by giving a talk at Disney. One of the themes from my talk was the topic of trying to create marketing that “goes viral”. There is a mad rush to create “viral content”, as if viral…
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It’s a tricky time to be a food marketer. How consumers define what it means to be “healthy” is in flux. As a food marketing friend pointed out, consumers are increasingly prioritizing food purity over calorie count. Chipotle is the poster brand for the current state of health positioning. They’re taking a leadership role in progressive stances like GMO-free and…
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Ad creative usually runs a gauntlet to get approved. Marketers often evaluate ads by ticking creative checklists to make sure ads are effective. But those very checklists, while intended to motivate best practices, can lead ads to become formulaic. And formulaic ads aren’t memorable. I spoke at a marketing conference in Nashville a couple weeks ago and heard the story…
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Around the executive table, marketing has traditionally had the hardest time proving their value. The correlation between marketing investment and revenue impact has often been fuzzy. This is particularly true for consumer marketing. When a shopper picks up a particular bottle of shampoo in the grocery aisle, how much of that decision was influenced by marketing? How much of that…
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Everything my younger daughter needed to know about advertising, she learned by buying Sea Monkeys with her allowance a few years ago. The ad pitch (which hasn’t changed since the version they ran in comic books when I was a kid) promises this whole world of smiling cartoon creatures and then the actual product is a dried pouch of brine…
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I’ve worked on both sides of the client-agency fence and have seen the power of deeply collaborative relationships between brands and their creative partners. Mutual respect and trust leads to the most engaging work. I’ve also seen what happens when vendors are treated too much like, well, vendors. Creative services are sometimes negotiated by the same procurement groups that source…
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Brand engagement is treated as the holy grail for marketers. Marketers sometimes operate as if consumers are just waiting around to have a relationship with their brand. This cartoon was partly inspired by a story Jimmy Fallon shared in an NPR interview: “I bought a pack of gum, and the receipt, I’m not kidding, was over a foot long. It…
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Even as brands continue to chase Millennials, marketers are starting to shift their attention to the next generation — Generation Z. Born after 1995, this is a group that grew up in our social, mobile, and digitally-connected world. There’s a lot of soul searching on how brands can can resonate with Generation Z. Emojis in particular are taking off, as…
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Last week was the annual pilgrimage to SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. Increasingly, SXSW is attracting big brands as a marketing venue to influencers (this year, even McDonalds has a presence) and as part of the search of the next new thing. Famously the launchpad for Twitter in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009, this year SXSW had everyone talking about…
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