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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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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“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.
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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Hackathons have gone mainstream. Originally the domain of scrappy tech start ups, hackathons are now hosted by large corporations and governments. This week’s cartoon was partly inspired by a very funny video from Vooza on the dark side of hackathons. A hackathon started as an event where teams of developers collaboratively code in an extreme manner over a short period…
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Everything I needed to know about marketing, I learned from Mark Addicks, who retired as CMO of General Mills in January. Mark is one of the main reasons I went into marketing as a career, so I want to share a few of my memories as a tribute to one of marketing’s great thinkers and inspiring mentors. When I was…
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Our media habits have changed irrevocably. But much of today’s marketing is still biased toward how we consumed media in the past. It feels like we’re in an awkward adolescent stage of media planning. Digital media is often bolted onto traditional media in a disjointed way. There’s not enough integrated planning where the big marketing idea comes first. Instead, a…
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Marketers spend a lot of time and effort trying to infer consumer behavior through the signals they leave online and offline. We’re in an interesting stage here. In some ways, the tools are continually getting more sophisticated (and creepy in their accuracy). In other ways, they are a blunt instrument with a lot of potential to draw false conclusions. Or…
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The road of data-driven marketing is bumpy. For all the promise, there’s also a lot of resistance. Many marketers are being dragged kicking and screaming into a world very different than where they started their careers. I’ve drawn a few cartoons on the tension between the Math Men and the Mad Men. Ultimately marketing will require both. But we’re in…
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While some brands plunked down $4.5 million for a 30-second spot this Superbowl Sunday, most marketers are being asked to do more with less. This can feel like an impossible task. I once moved from a large brand with a large advertising budget to a small challenger brand with virtually no budget. At the large brand, we used to complain…
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Innovation is not for the faint of heart. At times, managing innovation can feel like the myth of Sisyphus, repeatedly pushing a boulder up hill. Particularly when navigating the stage gate process. Most organizations use some form of stage gate process to manage innovation. New product ideas must pass through a series of stage gates, where they are poked, prodded,…
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Marketers love chasing the shiny new thing. It seems like every week, we learn about a new technology, social network, or media platform that promises to be the next big idea in marketing. We sometimes get so enamored by the shiny new thing that we forget the fundamentals that the business goals come first. The shiny objects that we come…
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