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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Creative briefs may be brief, but often they aren’t very creative. Rupal Parekh wrote an AdAge article on poor creative briefs last week: “Marketers, Quit Blaming Your Agency — It’s Your Brief at Fault”. It includes this illustrative quote from Casey Jones: “If you rated the industry on a scale from one to 10, with one being a horrifying piece…
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There is an inevitable friction in bringing ideas to life within a company. That friction can polish an idea and make it stronger, sand the edges of the idea and make it weaker, or kill the idea altogether. Anyone who works in innovation is familiar with that tension. Navigating it is part of what makes innovation so difficult. Malcolm Gladwell…
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Many brands bring an advertising campaign mindset to social media. A campaign has a start date and an end date. One campaign ends to make way for another. Yet success at social media requires sustained involvement. Social media doesn’t start and end with a “Like”. It grows over time. There can be individual campaigns as part of a social media…
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“Brands must be made into ‘media properties’”, announced Unilever CMO Keith Weed a couple months ago. Keith oversees the second largest marketing budget in the world at $3 billion, so his words carry a lot of weight. Brands are in the midst of recasting themselves as publishers. This shift conjures examples of self-serving advertorials, which were invented in the Mad…
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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.
Crisis management may not be one of the 4 Ps, but it is every much a part of marketing. How a company deals with a crisis is a far greater litmus test for the brand than how it executes an advertising campaign. Yet often the loudest voice in the midst of a crisis is legal. Sure, a legal liability assessment…
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Social badges are not merit badges. Yet many brands treat social media as checking a box, rather than making a commitment. There’s a “Like grab” underway to accumulate as many friends, fans, followers, and likes as possible. Social proof is not necessarily proof of quality. It’s easy for brands to feel encouraged as a campaign generates a few hundred or…
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Most brand storytelling wouldn’t pass the bedtime story test. Yet there’s never been a greater time for brands that can tell a story well. Content marketing is rapidly becoming a key plank of many marketing plans (now at 33% of the average marketing budget, according to Junta42). However, much of that content, whether distributed in social media or paid media,…
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I just learned I’m speaking at a conference this summer with Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”. Geoffrey wrote the book with high-tech products in mind but I find the model useful when thinking about brands as well. Innovations progress across five distinct customer groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Geoffrey argued that marketers should…
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On Friday, I spoke at a social media conference with Aaron Calloway, a brand manager from Axe. He shared the story of the provocative Axe Detailer CYB Campaign, which earned Axe a Cannes Gold Lion and propelled the brand to major growth. It was ranked the single most viral video of 2010. At one point, Aaron said, “Marketers often say…
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Every company has some form of innovation funnel. The funnel is wide at the front to capture potential ideas and narrows to the select few that launch. Projects progress from the idea stage through design and ultimately to market. Amazingly, the average new product success rate is less than 10%. So companies spend a lot of time on this innovation…
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The Facebook “Like” land grab is in full swing. Fan acquisition is becoming an increasing part of many marketing plans, in the midst of a lot of debate on the value of Facebook fans. Different pundits are increasingly trying to pinpoint a universal value to fans. As one observer summarized, “Your Facebook fans are worth exactly $1.07. No, they’re worth…
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This week, brand marketers descended on Austin for SXSW Interactive in a bigger mass than ever before. Most are grappling with how to incorporate social media into their marketing plans. They face a decision on how much to insource and how much to outsource. Last week, Chrysler revealed some of the risks of outsourcing, when someone at their social media…
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There are no low interest categories. Only low interest brands. That’s the main lesson I took away from five years at method. Even in a category as mundane as household cleaning products, you can create a brand with deep emotional connections. Marketers often limit ourselves by the conventional rules of a particular category. When we first join a brand team,…
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I spent a few days in Vermont last week with Eureka Ranch founder, Doug Hall. At one point, Doug said, “if you’re not meaningfully unique, you better be cheap”. Any idea that is “meaningfully unique” is inherently risky because by definition you can’t point to a precedent in the market. You have to step into the unknown, which is uncomfortable.…
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PR is called earned media for a reason. You have to earn it. If you earn it, PR can be far more valuable than paid media. But earned media follows different rules than paid media, and certainly different rules than spam. Some PR agencies forget that the “R” in PR stands for relations. They instead follow the antiquated “For Immediate…
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I sketched this cartoon while on hold with United Airlines last week. I spent a total of two hours and 12 minutes with United over four separate phone calls trying to get home from New York after the storm, so I had a lot of time to think about service. Many brands fall down on service. They view it as…
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There’s an interesting disagreement between Jim Stengel and Simon Clift, former CMOs of P&G and Unilever: “Who is Right: P&G or Unilever?“. Jim is in the process of writing a book and teaching a UCLA class on the role of purpose and ideals in business. He invited Simon Clift to talk to students last week and probed on the different…
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The founder of Geek Squad once described advertising as a “tax for unremarkable products”. No one wants to launch unremarkable products, so why do the vast majority of new products fall into this camp? We’ve all come across idea killers, those behaviors and attitudes that sand the edges of ideas as they are brought to life. Idea killers operate like…
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Many marketers asked Santa for a social coupon campaign for 2011. The explosive growth of Groupon and Groupon clones (BuyWithMe, LivingSocial, SocialBuy, and Tippr), offering “ridiculously huge” coupons (50-90% off), is taking marketing plans by storm. These social coupon sites promise high customer demand in return for a deep discount and a share of the deal. In August, Gap offered…
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Many organizations are better at blamestorming than brainstorming. It is far easier to critique than to create. No one wants to end up on the wall of failure. Blamestorming not only hampers big ideas. It creates a debilitating cycle of pointing the finger. Sales blames Marketing. Marketing blames R&D. R&D blames Operations. Operations blames Sales. Around it goes. Even thinking…
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