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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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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“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 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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If you’re ever on a video shoot, you’ll no doubt hear someone say, “we’ll fix it in post-production”. This usually happens toward the end of a long day, when everyone is tired and there’s a sticking point preventing everyone from going home. Sometimes the client hasn’t seen what they’re looking for. Sometimes there’s a stalemate on art direction. The promise…
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I’ve been hooked this week by Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin. Seth briefly profiles the Devil’s Advocate, which he describes as a “card-carrying member of the Resistance” — a force that prevents remarkable ideas from coming to life. In his blog, Seth occasionally advises his readers to “uninvite the devil’s advocate, since the devil doesn’t need one, he’s doing fine.”…
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I learned the power of archetypes from Joseph Campbell’s classic interview with Bill Moyers. The explore the universal themes, characters, and stories that repeat throughout history, appearing in every form of human expression from the Bible to Star Wars. These archetypes repeat because they resonate deeply with human consciousness. I first saw Joseph Campbell’s work applied to brands at General…
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The very first Saturday Night Live in 1975 featured a mock-commercial with George Carlin making fun of the Gillette Trac II, which was the first two-blade razor. SNL spoofed it with a fake three-blade razor called the Triple-Trac, and closed with a tagline, “The Triple-Trac. Because You’ll Believe Anything”. Twenty-three years later, in 1998, Gillette launched the Mach3 razor, the…
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Last week I joined one of the better idea generation exercises I’ve experienced in a while. We split into small groups and toured the San Francisco Ferry Building to scout out retail merchandising ideas. The Ferry Building is packed with novel, funky shops like a Far West Fungi, which only sells mushrooms: dried mushrooms, fresh mushrooms, mushroom ice cream —…
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I had a “Lost in Translation” moment a couple weeks ago in a meeting with 20 French and Russian executives. It was the first time I’d ever been in a meeting where someone simultaneously translated the discussion into ear pieces. I spent the whole meeting wondering if they really understood what we were trying to communicate. Many of my jokes…
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We can thank adman Alex Osbourne for the Brainstorm (he’s the O in the agency BBDO). Alex invented the Brainstorm in 1939 as an alternative to the usual meetings of “discouragement and criticism which so often cramp imagination”. Alex Osbourne realized that an environment is needed where judgement is suspended and ideas have space to grow. As part of the…
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ADHD isn’t just for teenagers. It afflicts businesses and teams too. I once heard a venture capitalist offer to prescribe Ritalin to one of his portfolio companies. It’s easy to get distracted by the Shiny New Thing. It’s particularly easy to get distracted when the going gets tough on your core plan and energy starts to wane. Whether it’s a new…
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I’m enjoying Rework, the entrepreneurial handbook by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson, founders of 37signals. I was inspired to read it after meeting Mark Rohde, who drew all of the illustrations. One of the brilliant riffs in the book is titled, “Nobody likes plastic flowers”. Jason and David lobby for the beauty of imperfection and advocate the Japanese principle…
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