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 my favorite idea killers is the statement, “if it were really a good idea, someone would already be doing it.” In innovation, we often fixate too much on the competition. We benchmark and validate ideas based what everyone else is doing. This cycle of one-upmanship makes it hard to launch something truly new and different. It also creates…
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Should campaigns be media-driven or idea-driven? Lately, it feels like the media tail is wagging the campaign dog. Many campaigns are built around a media platform, as if the media platform alone was the big idea. Most of the Foursquare campaigns I see feel like that. Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the…
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Every time I buy a new technology product, I wonder how long it will last. I salivate over anything new from Apple. But, I’ve had a number of Apple products fail recently. My Apple Time Capsule, marketed as a “revolutionary storage device”, died after just two years, unfixable, losing all the files it was designed to store. My two-year old…
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Mobile is the next frontier for marketing. Not all mobile marketing is spam, of course, but many current campaigns feature exactly that — unwanted, unsolicited SMS text messages. The potential of mobile marketing is far more powerful — location-specific, time-based, highly personalized messaging. It has the potential to offer real utility to consumers. But the current state seems more geared…
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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.
The gamification bandwagon continues, promising customer engagement and loyalty. What some marketers miss is that gamification means a lot more than badges, points, mayorships, and leader boards. Those game mechanics don’t necessarily create experiences worth playing. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. More importantly, gamification can’t make an un-engaging brand engaging. It may be the shiny new thing,…
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We all know the IDEO maxim, “Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner”. Rapid prototyping is a key principle of successful innovation. The sooner we make prototypes, the sooner we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what to make in the next prototype. Yet marketers are quicker to PowerPoint than to prototype. We spend more time on two-by-two matrixes and venn diagrams…
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It is a lot easier to kill an idea than to create one. Groups are often better equipped to critique than to create. I was struck by a recent NY Times article on the challenges of group creativity: “The Rise of the New Groupthink“: “Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and…
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This is the latest in a marketoon series with Baynote called “Intent to Buy” that parodies the state of e-commerce personalization. The series spotlights the top challenges that marketers face in online experience. Baynote is offering a signed print of this cartoon to every comment or cartoon suggestion posted at the Baynote blog over the next week (by 3/21; U.S.…
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The Kony video famously generated 70 million views last week. It left many marketers thinking of the “viral video” as a silver bullet. If a viral video could raise so much awareness of an Ugandan warlord, then maybe a viral video could raise awareness of a brand’s single minded proposition. Marketers often add viral videos to marketing plans as if…
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I gave a 30-minute talk today at the MarketingProfs conference on Content Marketing. In case you missed it, they’ve archived the talk here. I’ve also posted my slides and notes below. >>>>> I am both a cartoonist and a career marketer. I run a studio called Marketoon Studios that brings the two together. We create content marketing campaigns with cartoons…
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Pinterest is the talk of the marketing town. It’s the fastest growing social network, stars a highly engaged high-income audience, and is driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MySpace combined. As brands jump on the Pinsanity bandwagon, remember the lesson from every social network that preceded it. What’s more important than the platform is what we’re asking…
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Design thinking is regularly talked about in business, but design is often relegated to a supporting role. Two years ago, I spent a couple days at IDEO, seeing their approach to design thinking first hand. IDEO pioneered much of what the business world knows about design thinking. IDEO calls it human-centered design. In contrast, many organizations follow heritage-centered design. I…
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This cartoon is inspired by one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, showing two panels of a dog owner scolding his pet to stay out of the garbage. The first panel illustrates “what we say to dogs”. The second panel shows “what they hear”, with every word (except the dog’s name) replaced by “blah blah blah”. Consumers have this same…
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This is the latest in a marketoon series with Baynote called “Intent to Buy” that parodies the state of e-commerce personalization. The series spotlights the top challenges that marketers face in online experience. Baynote is offering a signed print of this cartoon to every comment or cartoon suggestion posted at the Baynote blog over the next week (by 2/22; U.S.…
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Few topics generate as many deer-in-headlights looks from marketers as social media ROI. It’s hard to know what to measure and it’s tricky to tie social media efforts directly to business results. A recent survey from the Chartered Institute of Marketers showed that very few marketers can measure the effectiveness of social media. Nearly a third describe social media as…
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I started sketching this cartoon weeks ago after hearing that Carnival offered a voucher for 30% off future cruises to passengers of the Costa Condordia. Coincidentally this was before last week’s dramatic blunders of Susan G Komen for the Cure. PR crises are nothing new. The field of crisis management originated with the environmental and industrial disasters of the 1980’s…
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Next Sunday’s Super Bowl will be one of the biggest social media integrated live events ever, including a 2,800-square-foot social media command center built for the game. Super Bowl advertisers are building social into their campaigns like never before. GM created a Chevy Game Time mobile app to answer trivia, win prizes, and engage during the game. Coke is hosting…
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How we execute matters a lot more than which tactics we execute. A few years ago, I helped launch the method brand in the UK. We thought sampling would help tell the brand story person-to-person. We soon discovered that most in-store sampling treated all brands the same. The sampling staff did their jobs, but it was obvious that our brand…
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