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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There’s a diner in my town with a huge “Follow us on Facebook” sign in the window. Yet if you go to their Facebook page, there’s nothing worth following there. They haven’t updated it in months. It’s a social media ghost town. Nashville marketer Laura Click recently posed the question, “Is your company creating a social media ghost town?” Many…
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“Monetize” is one of the top 10 buzz words for 2010. Many businesses are retooling their business models and figuring out new revenue streams. Last week, I spent a few thought-stirring days in Portland at a publishing workshop organized by Todd Sattersten. We talked about the future of publishing, which is in the middle of epic change. The workshop offered…
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We can thank adman Alex Osborn for the brainstorm (he’s the O in agency BBDO). In 1948, Alex noted that most offices were full of “discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination”. So he invented the brainstorm as a break from the day-to-day office environment. In a brainstorm, ideas could blossom safely before being subjected to critical thought. Brainstorming…
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The famous Cannes Festival is adding a new category of Creative Effectiveness in 2011 “to establish a direct correlation between creativity and effectiveness … now more than ever ROI is paramount to the client.” This change touches on a long-standing grievance that clients have with ad agencies: a weak appreciation for the business results of the work. In the 1960’s…
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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.
I’ve been thinking lately about where ideas come from and the conditions and environments that inspire creativity. I came across an inspiring article from Scott Belsky who writes on the importance of deep thinking and the “creative pause”: “This phenomenon is the seed of the break-through “a-ha!” moments that people so frequently report having in the shower. In these moments,…
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David Kelley at IDEO once said that you have to “fail faster to succeed sooner”. You can tell a lot about an organization by how they treat failure. Do they focus on the learning or do they focus on the punishment? When I worked at General Mills, they launched a new snack brand called Wahoos to take on Frito-Lay. The…
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Every brand has some form of a brand butterfly, whether they call it a brand onion, a brand architecture, a brand key, a brand pyramid, a brand d.n.a, or a brand unicorn. It’s the one-page blueprint of the brand. When written well, it can be an invaluable resource. It sparks new ideas and helps guide all of your decisions on…
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I’ve heard mobile apps described as the new web site. And that having a mobile app is essential to gaining “share of conversation”. There are more than 300,000 mobile apps today on Apple’s platform alone, up from 200,000 just last year. Many of these apps are launched by brands as a new way to reach consumers. Brand owners have taken…
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Brands are flocking to Facebook in greater herds than ever before. Facebook has become an integral tick box on just about every marketing plan. Yet setting up a Facebook page alone won’t suddenly make a brand more social. The question for a brand to ask is not whether to use social media. The question to ask is how to make…
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I recently decided to take my cartooning to the next level. Ten years ago this week, I started drawing cartoons in business school. Since then, I’ve doodled nights, weekends, and early mornings, dreaming of a day when I could do it full-time. The hard part wasn’t finding the idea to turn my cartooning into a business. It was reaching a point…
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Crafting an annual plan is like getting a bill through Congress. Behind the final numbers and strategies lie countless hours of spreadsheet crunching, hallway meetings, and waterfall charts. We debate assumptions, broker compromises, and eventually settle on a plan that is wrong the moment it’s inked. A finance director once told me that “spending more time on planning won’t make…
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Henry Ford famously said, “if I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’”. Many businesses treat focus groups as prophetic. Whether looking for inspiration or validation, they give staggering authority to eight strangers gathered on the other side of a one-way mirror. After one particularly idea-sapping focus group, a creative director leaned over to me and said,…
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I recently heard someone referred to as a “seagull manager”, a term Ken Blanchard coined in 1985: “seagull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, then fly out.” This conversation prompted a discussion on bad managers of all stripes. Everyone at the table had a top-of-mind example. I grouped some of the most common offenders into…
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In the social media bandwagon, brands place a lot of emphasis on the absolute number of friends, fans, and followers. They treat that number as a proxy for how well the brand is reaching its audience. The assumption is the bigger the number, the more effective the outreach. Six years ago, Häagen-Dazs followed a consumer landgrab strategy with a loyalty…
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Whether on package copy, TV ads, or websites, most brands talk in the same self-referential and self-absorbed way. It’s by design. That’s usually the first filter of a creative review: run through a checklist to make sure that all the key benefits from the brief are there. The problem is that there’s rarely a filter that all that brand talk…
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I recently heard someone refer to their legal department as a “Sales Prevention Department”. I realized that most businesses have some sort of “idea prevention department”, whether they nickname it the “VP of We Can’t” or the “Abominable No Men”. These are the alarmists who are so focused on what can go wrong that they miss the big picture. When…
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For many businesses, planning for 2011 is in full swing, particularly the horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target. The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable. The leadership team sets an top-down stretch target that is much higher. Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers. There are a few schools…
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Beta releases used to be restricted to small groups of Beta testers. A Beta release allowed you to work out the bugs before a general market release. When a product shipped, it was considered final until the next release. Nowadays, many products are in perpetual Beta (and we’re all Beta testers). Gmail, Flickr and del.icio.us carry the Beta designation for years…
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My friend Michelle introduced me to the expression, Jumping the Shark, which is used to describe “the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise.” It comes from the fifth season of the classic American sitcom, Happy Days, when Fonzie donned swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket to perform a ridiculous water ski jump over a shark. The guy…
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The quickest way to rankle a creative director is to ask to make the logo bigger. It’s an age-old feud that has existed since the dawn of advertising. It’s often the first piece of feedback shared, and has even led to its own song: “Make the logo as big as you can. And make the logo bigger. I don’t want…
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