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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In 2012, the default generic introduction message on LinkedIn was “Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.” Since that greeting was often sent to people they’d never met (let alone trusted), it inspired me to draw a cartoon about a guy saying this greeting to passersby on a random…
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In 2013, I drew a cartoon with an executive telling his colleagues, “I support word-of-mouth marketing, just as long as we tightly control exactly what they say.” That tension of control and letting go has long been a tricky one for marketers to navigate, both inside and outside a company. I’ve been thinking about that sentiment in the context of…
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In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute introduced the 95:5 Rule, a simple but powerful concept that challenged conventional thinking in B2B marketing. In his research, John showed that up to 95% of buyers are not in the market in any one time (and perhaps won’t be for months or years). As he put it: “This is a…
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The NYT published a fascinating article last month on the conundrum of AI accuracy and reliability. They found that even as AI models were getting more powerful, they generated more errors, not fewer. In OpenAI’s own tests, their newest models hallucinated at higher rates than their previous models. One of their benchmarks is called a SimpleQA test, based on general…
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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.
I stumbled across this line from advertising professor Tyler Dolph: “Creative without strategy is called ‘art’ — creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’” The annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which ended a few days ago, always reminds me of the tension of creativity and effectiveness. Last year was the first time I attended this most celebrated advertising award…
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I stumbled across this observation from a product marketer named James Christopher: “When everyone speaks the language of authenticity, no one sounds authentic anymore… “We’ve created a world where the only truly authentic thing is our collective exhaustion with fake authenticity.” Against the backdrop of so many brands pushing “authenticity” as a messaging priority, it’s no wonder that consumers are…
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A strategy has to be more than buzzword-deep. In 2017, a publicly traded beverage company called the Long Island Iced Tea Corp. announced that it was renaming itself Long Blockchain Corp. They gave no justification for the pivot. But based on the name change alone to replace “iced tea” with “blockchain”, their stock price surged 380%. Temporarily, that is –…
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The expression “Garbage In, Garbage Out” emerged in the earliest days of computer science. A 1957 article on US army mathematicians working with old-school IBM mainframes used the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” to describe how poor quality data inputs lead to poor quality outputs. The adage has only grown more relevant in our increasingly data-driven world. Our decisions based…
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Marketing technology has always been something of an arms race. Yesterday’s breakthroughs turns into today’s table stakes. Agentic AI is being touted as the next frontier in the race. Marketers are already starting to implement Marketing AI agents across their tech stacks to analyze customer data, tailor messaging, and run campaigns. These AI agents can operate autonomously, with limited human…
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“Price” is only one of the classic Four Ps of Marketing (the other three are “Product”, “Placement”, and “Promotion”). But it’s sure getting most of the focus right now, as businesses figure out how to brace for tariff impact. Some brands like Black & Decker have already started raising pricing. Others like P&G and Hasbro have signaled that price increases…
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I’ve been hearing requests from some of you to draw a cartoon explicitly on the impact of tariffs — including one reader fresh from the Canton Fair (China’s largest trade show). Businesses of all sizes and geographies have been trying to estimate the potential impact. Last week, 3M estimated potential annual impact of $850 million and J&J $400 million. But…
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There’s an aphorism I heard somewhere that “brands want to be human and humans want to be brands.” I’ve always found it funny when brand teams try to engineer sounding “human”. It can be like manufacturing “authenticity.” It’s often easy to see through it. But it’s particularly funny to me in the age of AI, as our own human roles…
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A couple years ago, Cory Doctorow observed a phenomenon in online products and platforms that he dubbed “enshittification”: “Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.…
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There’s a famous observation from Dwight D. Eisenhower I’ve always found interesting: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Another is Mike Tyson’s quip before a fight with Evander Holyfield: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” What we know as “scenario planning” can be traced back to a Shell strategist named Pierre Wack in 1965.…
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Organizations have been sending very mixed signals with AI. Many have claimed a strategy of being “AI-first” in one breath, while setting confusing draconian guardrails in the next. The promise of AI has outpaced our organization’s ability to adopt it. I like how Oguz Acar, professor at King’s Business School advocated for a more balanced approach to adopting AI in…
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Almost exactly five years ago, in early March 2020, I drew a cartoon that captured some of how I felt in that moment of uncertainty. It showed a group of of people in a meeting and one holding up a coin: “We need to update the forecast. Heads, this will blow over soon. Tails, it’s the end of the world.”…
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In 2006, I drew one of my most popular cartoons: “The 8 Types of Bad Creative Critics.” It featured common archetypes like “The Blender”, “The Waffler” and “The Crammer.” It seemed to strike a chord because many of us have been in bad creative reviews, on either side of the client/agency table. One agency even asked to print the cartoon…
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In 2012, I drew a cartoon of a shopper emptying her purse at checkout, saying “wait, I may have a card showing my loyalty to whatever store this is.” The loyalty program arms race has only accelerated since then — partly driven by brands trying to collect more first-party data. The checkout ask for an email address or phone number…
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With all the hype and promise of AI, including synthetic market research I wrote about last week and new advances like “Agenic AI”, adoption in business is facing barriers and obstacles. Deloitte published their latest State of Generative AI report last month, including this headline takeaway: “We see that most companies are transforming at the speed of organizational change, not…
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Early in my marketing career, at General Mills, we used to hold focus groups in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie. I once overheard a couple of our agency partners jokingly refer to this focus group ritual as going to see the “Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Whether new products, campaign strategy, or ad creative, the Oracles of Eden Prairie had…
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