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 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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“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.
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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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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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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