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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One of the takeaways from Advertising Week in New York last week is the rise of “branded content”. Brands are embracing the potential of branded content to blur the lines between advertising and entertainment. It seems like every week, I hear the expression, “Content is King”. It’s true that content marketing holds great promise, as marketers start to create communication…
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The rise of the online review is one of the more transformative shifts in marketing. Giving or reading feedback on just about any brand (personal or corporate) is only a smartphone touch away. Brand communication is increasingly coming from sources other than the brand. Reputation management is now a fundamental part of brand management. Gone is the bait-and-switch school of…
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The design community has been in a tizzy since Marissa Mayer shared the shallow design process that led to the new Yahoo logo. Over a weekend, Marissa personally rolled up her sleeves to micromanage the logo design with a small team. The whole approach was pilloried by a number of designers, including a very funny piece from Oliver Reichenstein: “Logo,…
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RedBull achieved marketing nirvana last year when they sponsored Felix Baumgartner’s jump from a helium balloon in the stratosphere to become the first human to break the sound barrier without vehicular power. This publicity stunt was the perfect marketing win-win. “Red Bull Stratos” captured the world’s attention and perfectly gelled with the positioning statement that “RedBull gives you wings”. Many…
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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 challenged to create short-form media. Some of this shift is driven by new standards. Facebook will start offering 15-second video ads this Fall. Instagram video is capped at 15 seconds and Vine from Twitter is capped at only six seconds. But the underlying driver is the vanishing attention span. This year a study pegged the average attention…
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Marketers often confuse loyalty with getting consumers to carry one more plastic card in a wallet already filled with plastic loyalty cards. I experienced this cartoon a few weeks ago at an Office Depot in Colorado. The one and only cashier leisurely chatted up every customer with the same up-sell pitch (loyalty points, extended warranties, impulse items at the till),…
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One of the more memorable scenes from the 2002 movie Minority Report was a dystopian view of advertising in the year 2054. The protagonist, John Anderton, walks through a mall, where retina scanners match his identity with purchase history so that billboards can pitch personal ads to him as he walks by. Consumers have been dreading this and marketers have…
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Businesses have increasingly realized that they can’t do innovation alone. Many have implemented open innovation programs to make it easier to bring in ideas from the outside world. As Nanako Mura from Kraft put it, “we recognize that we don’t know everything.” A.T. Kearney wrote, “No single company is large enough or inventive enough to be an innovation leader without…
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Marketers are in a mad rush to target Millennials. They are the largest consumer group in history and expected to spend more than Baby Boomers by 2017. Millennials also came of age with a different relationship to marketing and brands. This creates tension as marketers figure out how to communicate to a new wave of consumers who can be resistant…
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Many brands aspire to become lifestyle brands. Lifestyle brands are seen as the pinnacle of marketing. Marketers elevate these brands beyond functional attribute to higher-order benefits. Consumers express their identities through these brands. This strategy promises differentiation and growth. One of the reasons that method succeeded was its positioning as a lifestyle brand in the commodity category of household cleaning.…
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Many brands are hardwired for one-way conversations. These brands work hard to limit the time actually engaging with consumers. They consider call centers as cost centers. They sometimes program the call center computer voice to say that “0” is not a valid option because they don’t want to pay for anyone to talk to a live person. These brands may…
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Walmart projects that 100% of its sales growth will come from multicultural customers. They are doubling their multicultural advertising spend. Marketers can’t ignore the demographic trends. In the US, 93% of population growth is multicultural, nearing 40% of the population, and one in four babies born is Hispanic. To grow, marketers clearly need a strategy to drive penetration with multicultural…
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If you have the feeling that ads are stalking you more than ever, you’re right. Facebook pioneered advertising based on social signals (clicking “Like us on Facebook”). Recently they’ve embraced old-school ad retargeting too. Ads are popping up in news feeds and sidebars not just based on Likes, but also because of other websites users visited in the past. Twitter…
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“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Simon Sinek famously said. Marketers are all taught to define a “brand promise”. The deeper opportunity is to understand our “brand purpose” – an ideal that drives everything a brand does. Purpose is increasingly part of a marketer’s vocabulary, yet many brands take a tick-box approach. They may…
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Authenticity and transparency are two of the biggest marketing buzzwords right now (and have been gaining steam for a while). Nearly every case study and talk coming out of Cannes last week seemed to reference authenticity as a theme. Like any marketing bandwagon, some brands are applying the lessons superficially at best. There’s a difference between sounding authentic and being…
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In advertising, there’s no such thing as a captive audience. It’s easier than ever for people to tune out experiences they don’t like (although, sadly, this doesn’t apply to boring meetings). YouTube codified this with the “Skip This Ad” buttons on the ads that run before the content you actually want to see. In one sense, that reinforces the definition…
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Last week I spoke at Signal P&G, an event put on by P&G and Federated Media that brought a variety of tech thinkers (from Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.) to the birth place of brand management to talk about the future of marketing. Margo Georgiadis from Google shared an insight that struck me in particular: “mobile is the new end…
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This week, I’m traveling to Cincinnati to speak at Signal P&G. The theme of the event is “winning brand building at the speed of digital”. I’m looking forward to visiting the birth place of brand management to reflect on all of the seismic changes happening in marketing. One of the biggest shifts is data-driven marketing. Increasingly, today’s marketers have to…
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Brand owners never really own the brand. Consumers do. I recently spoke at two events for Destination Marketing Association International. Their members are marketers tasked with driving tourism to their regions. I came across a tourism case study about who really “owns” a brand. The Kentucky Department of Tourism invested $600,000 to “brand” the state of Kentucky. They came up…
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