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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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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“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.
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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A Chicago family recently received a promotional mailer from OfficeMax addressed to “Mike Seay/Daughter Killed in Car Crash/Or Current Business.” The Seay family lost their daughter less than a year earlier. Including “daughter killed in car crash” wording on the envelope was obviously a mistake, but the issue is far bigger than a typo. Having that sensitive data to begin…
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My post last week on the innovation buzzword “disruptive” got me thinking about another overused and abused example in our corporate lexicon — “pivot”. The idea of a pivot was first coined by Lean Startup writer, Eric Ries, as a type of course correction that startups can make as they find product-market fit. Here’s how he first described it in…
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Marketers are full of buzzwords, particularly when talking about innovation. Even the term “innovation” is a cliché in danger of losing its meaning. In talking about innovation, it’s easy to get lost in the “strategery” and lose sight of the actual consumer need. We marketers tend to breathe our own exhaust after a while. One of the more misunderstood and…
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Marketers have never had more data at their disposal. The opportunity to glean insights by crunching all of these new sources of data is pretty intoxicating. Yet having access to the data is only one part of the equation. Making sense of the data is the harder part. Marketers sometimes forget the Statistics 101 maxim that correlation doesn’t imply causation.…
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Marketers increasingly see mobile as an integral part of the marketing mix and have invested significantly in mobile apps. 92 of the world’s top 100 brands have at least one app on Apple’s app store. Yet most apps are completely lost in the clutter. There are over a million active apps for both iPhone and Android and 90% of people…
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The meeting after the meeting sometimes has more impact that the meeting itself. In many organizations, that’s where people share their real opinions and where the real decisions are made. A team might agree around the conference table, but then express doubts in the “safer” environment of the hallway or coffee shop. It’s a passive aggressive way to squash ideas,…
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Ad retargeting is on the rise — those ads that stalk you across the internet after you’ve even briefly visited a company’s site. Google is even testing cross-platform ad retargeting, so a site that you visit from your desktop can lead to ads served on your mobile devices. The potential of retargeting is huge for marketers — highly relevant advertising.…
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There’s a growing movement in Silicon Valley to replace “Marketers” with a new position called “Growth Hackers”. Some are claiming that startups should eliminate their marketing teams altogether. I agree that marketers in general need to become more data-oriented and tech-savvy. I also respect many of the techniques that are getting categorized as “growth hacks”. But I seriously question that…
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