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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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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“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 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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Marketers are increasingly crowdsourcing aspects of their campaigns and bringing fans into the creative process. Over 20% of the ads in the last Super Bowl used some form of crowdsourcing. In February, Hasbro let a Facebook survey pick which Monopoly piece would replace the iron. Surprise, surprise, the Internet picked a cat. Crowdsourcing can bring higher levels of engagement to…
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There’s a old marketing axiom that advertising’s greatest enemy isn’t rejection; it’s indifference. Mountain Dew and Hyundai both tested this philosophy in the last two weeks with ads they ultimately pulled for being too offensive. In today’s social media world, where there’s no longer a captive audience, brands are pushing boundaries more than ever to get attention (and to try…
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A few years ago, a yogurt brand increased its margin by putting less yogurt in every container while keeping the same retail price. So that the products wouldn’t look smaller, they kept the same packaging, which meant that every container suddenly had several inches of air at the top of the yogurt. To justify this obvious drop in value, they…
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Lately, every new Internet meme seems to attract a stampede of brands eager to get in on the action. Memevertising is joining more and more marketing plans as the latest “get viral quick” scheme. Internet memes by definition tap the popular psyche. This creates an opportunity for brands to have a voice in cultural conversations. Yet as more brands gatecrash…
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It cracks me up that there are two main disciplines that require one-way mirrors: market research and police interrogation (although I imagine that market research is the only one that stocks bowls of M&Ms on the dark side of the glass). Identifying a target market for a brand is one of the trickiest but most essential aspects of marketing. Yet…
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Marketers have long embraced April Fool’s Day (a few years ago, a colleague of mine sent a Canadian coworker a realistic deportation letter from the INS). But lately, more and more marketers have been taking April Fool’s to consumers. Brand hoaxes can be great ways to connect to audiences with humor. They are also risky because they can so easily…
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We’re in the awkward adolescent stage of integrated media. There is still a great divide between traditional and digital brand communication. This becomes obvious in the disjointed way that many brands talk to consumers offline and online and the clumsy calls-to-action from traditional media to digital. It always cracks me up when I’m asked to scan a QR code in…
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We’re still figuring out what it means to be a social brand. This month, Facebook redesigned its News Feed to provide even more real estate to advertising. They also announced that the sponsored stores they’ve created in News Feeds haven’t turned off users the way they feared. That means that opportunities will continue to increase for brands to elbow in…
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I heard once that there are three types of companies: rule makers, rule followers, and rule breakers. It’s easy for rule makers and rule followers to get complacent, particularly in industries that have been around for a while. As marketers, we often focus so closely on our direct competition, we can miss the big picture. I had a manager once…
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Last week, I had the great fortune of going to TED in person after watching the talks online for years. As a marketer, I was struck by a TED project called “Ads Worth Spreading“. Each year, TED and YouTube award ten ads that are “worth spreading”. As TED Curator Chris Anderson put it, “We’re seeking to reverse the trend of…
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Social media allows brands to start conversations, but are they conversations worth starting? Lately it seems like nearly every ad closes with an invitation to “join the conversation” with a dedicated Twitter hashtag. Over half of the Superbowl ads closed with a hashtag, and I’ve even seen hashtags at the end of cheesy local TV ads. Hashtags can be used…
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