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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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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“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.
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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The old adage goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. This has long been true of our data. Consumers pay for “free” services like search engines and social networks by letting companies collect and package their data so that marketers can target them more effectively. Nowhere is this more visible than the increasing trend of…
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Many marketers have funnel-vision. We learn to see our customers in a linear path. Our job is to systematically move customers from step to step. The rise of data-driven marketing has made it easier to measure and improve the performance of each stage. In theory, this model keeps marketers focused on activities that lead to results. In practice, the funnel…
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YouTube has been increasingly promoting its homegrown talent to advertisers. YouTube vlogger Michelle Phan partnered with Lancome, Bethany Mota partnered with Aeropostale, and the Fine Brothers partnered with Friskies. Brands have been partnering with social media influencers for years. It can be an effective way for a brand to combine content creation with audience reach. But it’s tempting for brands…
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’Tis the season of targeted holiday advertising. According to the AA/Warc Expenditure Report (UK), brands spend 35% of their annual ad budget in the Christmas period, more than any other time of the year. Christmas advertising spend in 2014 is setting records (up 24% in the UK over the last 5 years), with much of that moving online and to…
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Marketers are increasingly driven by data. But as I parodied a couple weeks ago, we have to be careful with what data we choose to listen to. Data is malleable. We can cherry pick data to support just about any argument we care to make. That’s one of the skills we learn in business school. But as Kraft’s Julie Fleischer…
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Organizations often give mixed signals with innovation. There is a constant drumbeat to come up with the new ideas that will take a business forward. Yet, there is also resistance to change and pressure to maintain the status quo. It’s an innovation catch-22. A few years ago, I attended an innovation brainstorm that rented out a room full of beanbag…
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Marketing is getting increasingly personalized. Mobile technology in particular is making it easier than ever for marketers to personalize their message to consumers. But “personalization” doesn’t necessarily mean “personal.” Personalization is a blunt instrument. It’s often inaccurate. And when marketing tries to personalize, but misses the mark, the effect can be more annoying that not personalizing at all. Awkward personalization…
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Marketing is increasingly “data-driven”. But that doesn’t have to mean “data-blinded”. It feels like there’s a polarizing schism between the art and the science of marketing — the Mad Men and the Math Men (and women). Mad Men resent the Math Men for taking over the creative process with analytics and Math Men resent the Mad Men for making marketing…
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Programmatic technology is fundamentally changing advertising. Programmatic is an auction-based system where ads are bought and served across the web to a specific audience in real time. Currently 20% of online ad buying occurs with programmatic technologies, but the number is growing quickly. GE sent out a brief earlier this year that they’d like to become 100% programmatic some day.…
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In 2000, the attention span of the modern consumer was 12 seconds. It’s now 8 seconds. The average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds. Marketers are in the business of trying to catch (and hold) people’s attentions. That has always been a challenge. But it’s only getting harder. Thus the the trend toward “snackable content”, a marketing buzzword…
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Retargeting has taken the advertising world by storm. No longer do advertisers have to hope that an audience they want will be found at a particular publisher. They can chase audiences everywhere based on some signal of intent, independent of publishers. Not even Waldo can hide. The problem of course is that ad stalking can be creepy. It’s creepy not…
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Jerry Seinfeld recently recently started a harsh, but funny, rant about advertising at the Clio awards by saying, “I love advertising because I love lying.” He went on to say “I think spending your lives trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.” It…
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