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 has never been easier to start a business. The infrastructure is in place to get businesses going for lower investment than just about any time in history. Yet that doesn’t mean that every startup is worth starting. There is a skewed sense of reality (particularly where I live near San Francisco) that capital seems to reward startup ideas for…
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Last week, the new social network Ello sparked a tremendous amount of attention with its promise to become the Anti-Facebook. Ello is now receiving 45,000 hourly requests to join, based primarily on a short manifesto on advertising and social media: “Your social network is owned by advertisers. Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow…
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If a brand has to shout that it’s “new and improved”, it’s probably not all that new or improved. “New and improved” is the easiest and lamest of marketing claims. Marketers use it to create new spin on an old brand, but it’s often not much more than label-deep. It’s the least interesting marketing lever to pull. I was struck…
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“There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle,” Jim Barksdale said 20 years ago at Netscape. I was struck by a recent HBR interview with Jim and fellow Netscape alum Mark Andreessen about the role of bundling and unbundling in business. Cable TV providers of course get the most…
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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.
Brand teams are quick to rebrand when they hit a rough patch. But they sometimes forget that a brand is more than a company name, logo, tagline, or ad creative. And that a shiny new brand identity won’t automatically solve all of the problems of the business. The marketing world is littered with failed rebranding initiatives (from the Gap to…
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Marketers are increasingly pushing for “transparency” and “authenticity” in their brand communication. But, for many brands, this is surface-deep. They want advertising that makes them look authentic and transparent without actually being authentic and transparent. Filmmaker Johan Liedgren wrote a snarky satirical open letter replying to a request to produce “authentic” looking commercials for a brand: “I count no less…
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No sooner had the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge started trending than social media marketers were trying to reverse-engineer it to figure out what made it go viral. It’s been dubbed “the viral event of the summer”. I’ve seen several write ups on how brands can apply the lessons of the Ice Bucket Challenge to their marketing and create the “next”…
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Product placement has been around since the early days of entertainment, but it feels like we’re in an awkward adolescent period, weird growth spurts and all. As the entire nature of entertainment shifts and viewers can more easily tune out commercial breaks, marketers are leaping more than ever into the shows themselves. Sometimes the results are really obnoxious, like this…
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There has never been a better time to take the stage as a brand and share content with our audience. Every night can be open mic night. Yet the rise of content marketing has created an avalanche of really generic branded content. There is still a far greater emphasis of quantity over quality. Much of it reads the same, as…
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I first drew this cartoon for a presentation at Google, and I’ve been getting enough requests from people to license it, I wanted to share it here. Many brands try to be all things to all people. It can be tempting for marketers to try to target everyone, particularly if you want to reach scale. Yet brands that try to…
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How we review creative is as valuable a part of the creative process as the creative itself. Yet the creative review is often overlooked and frequently misunderstood. The most talented designers in the world will create mediocre work if the creative review process is managed in a mediocre way. I love the video that circulated a few years ago called…
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Consumers are increasingly aware just how much personal data they’re sharing with marketers. Whether browsing online or shopping in a store with a loyalty card, consumers reveal a lot of themselves every time they interact with a brand. In a recent Communispace study (PDF), 86% of consumers would click a “Do Not Track” button if one existed and 30% would…
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Organizations can spot the risks of a new idea a mile away. But there’s a curious blind spot when it comes to the risks of not taking those risks. The path of least resistance is to play it safe and keep the idea as close to the tried-and-true as possible. We just need to ask Polaroid how that strategy works…
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The ad creative process can be just as circuitous and political as the classic Schoolhouse Rock video about how a bill becomes a law. Creative briefs often read like peace treaties between the client and agency that pack in everything about a brand (except for a meaningful point of difference). When advertising falls flat, the root cause is often a…
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Marketers can go a little trademark crazy. Sometimes we focus so much on the trademarked features of a product that we lose sight of the actual consumer need. Last week, someone sent me a piece of marketing communication for a new razor, the “Gillette(R) Fusion(R) ProGlide(R) with Flexball(TM) technology.” The string of four trademarked names to describe a single product…
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How Draconian are your Brand Guidelines? Many brands focus so much on maintaining consistency that they forget one of the most important goals of Brand Guidelines — inspiring creative work. Building a brand takes a village, inside the company and out. From agencies to packaging engineers, there are a lot of people who touch and influence how a brand comes…
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There’s a fine line between Push and pushy. Marketers have an extraordinarily powerful tool in reaching consumers through their mobile devices. There is potential to deliver messaging to consumers that is perfectly matched to their intent. Yet much of the push marketing that I’ve experienced is anything but. Push without relevance is invasive. There is also a fine line between…
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The rise of A/B testing has transformed marketing. Marketers can now instantly test and adapt messaging based on live data. A change in something as minor as the color of a call-to-action button can lead to performance improvements though the whole marketing funnel. Yet sometimes marketers follow the data blindly. Sometimes the data cart can lead the creative horse. This…
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Hugh MacLeod once cartooned “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in social media, particularly as brands migrate their commercial messages from ads on the side to sponsored posts in the center. I had a chance to go to Facebook’s headquarters recently and was…
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