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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I once drew a cartoon with someone trying to call customer service and hearing: “Your call is very important to us. Please hold while we evaporate all the goodwill created by our expensive advertising.” I’ve been thinking lately about the state of customer service, particularly with customer service touted as one of the first areas to be fully automated by…
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I love this observation by Adam Grant: “Confirmation bias is twisting the facts to fit your beliefs. Critical thinking is bending your beliefs to fit the facts. “Seeking the truth is not about validating the story in your head. It’s about rigorously vetting and accepting the story that matches the reality in the world.” In an increasingly data-driven world, we…
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Disney alum Paul Williams once shared the brainstorming method developed by Walt Disney. Disney used to separate the act of coming up with and executing ideas into three distinct steps (and associated mindsets): The Dreamer, The Realist, and The Spoiler. As Paul wrote: “By compartmentalizing the stages, Walt didn’t let reality get in the way of the dream step. The…
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I’ve never been that comfortable with the term “content”, even though I use it like everyone else. Ad exec Dave Trott once gave voice to some of what bugs me about calling it “content”: “Content (noun): everything that is inside a container; the contents of a box.” “So there it is: we’re in the shipping business. That’s what happened to what…
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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.
In August 2011, Scott Brinker created the first official “Marketing Technology Landscape.” It was a supergraphic with logos of the 150 different marketing solutions in the market at the time. Scott continued mapping the landscape as the number of marketing technology solutions exploded — doubling to 350 in 2012 and blowing past 5,000 just five years later in 2017. I…
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There’s a funny old observation on data analytics from Duke professor Dan Ariely from 2012 or 2013: “Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” I’ve been thinking about that in the context of digital and AI…
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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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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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