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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Organizations have been sending very mixed signals with AI. Many have claimed a strategy of being “AI-first” in one breath, while setting confusing draconian guardrails in the next. The promise of AI has outpaced our organization’s ability to adopt it. I like how Oguz Acar, professor at King’s Business School advocated for a more balanced approach to adopting AI in…
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Almost exactly five years ago, in early March 2020, I drew a cartoon that captured some of how I felt in that moment of uncertainty. It showed a group of of people in a meeting and one holding up a coin: “We need to update the forecast. Heads, this will blow over soon. Tails, it’s the end of the world.”…
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In 2006, I drew one of my most popular cartoons: “The 8 Types of Bad Creative Critics.” It featured common archetypes like “The Blender”, “The Waffler” and “The Crammer.” It seemed to strike a chord because many of us have been in bad creative reviews, on either side of the client/agency table. One agency even asked to print the cartoon…
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In 2012, I drew a cartoon of a shopper emptying her purse at checkout, saying “wait, I may have a card showing my loyalty to whatever store this is.” The loyalty program arms race has only accelerated since then — partly driven by brands trying to collect more first-party data. The checkout ask for an email address or phone number…
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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.
With all the hype and promise of AI, including synthetic market research I wrote about last week and new advances like “Agenic AI”, adoption in business is facing barriers and obstacles. Deloitte published their latest State of Generative AI report last month, including this headline takeaway: “We see that most companies are transforming at the speed of organizational change, not…
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Early in my marketing career, at General Mills, we used to hold focus groups in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie. I once overheard a couple of our agency partners jokingly refer to this focus group ritual as going to see the “Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Whether new products, campaign strategy, or ad creative, the Oracles of Eden Prairie had…
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We need to find time for focus to do our best work. Ironically some of the tools we use to make us more productive are designed to steal focus. Distraction is the default setting. Some of this challenge relates to work norms. I love how Jeff Maurer joked about the “always on” expectations of Slack: “You CAN mute notifications: Just…
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The Super Bowl is the biggest high wire act in marketing. The media alone costs $7 million for a 30 second spot to reach an audience of more than 100 million people. So this is when marketers pull out all the stops. And yet they also tend to play it safe by following tried-and-true conventions. You don’t want to mess…
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In 2001, a group of 17 software engineers famously drafted the Agile Manifesto at a ski resort in Utah. They were frustrated by the limitations of traditional “waterfall” software development and wanted a more flexible, iterative approach. The term “agile” evolved into a collection of methodologies that not only changed software development but started to impact teams of all kinds.…
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Sir John Hegarty, founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, famously said: “Writing bad briefs is the most expensive way to write advertising.” The sentiment applies to any form of creative communication and any type of brief. How we brief creative partners is as important as the talent of those creative partners. Writing a truly great brief is a force multiplier of…
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It’s hard to make sense of the real promise of AI amidst the hype and noise. In 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai famously compared AI to the creation of fire and invention of electricity on an episode of 60 Minutes. By 2024, the hype cycle around AI gave way to the trough of disillusionment, as many businesses struggled to see…
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Over the last decade, “Free Returns” became the new “Free Shipping,” going from differentiator (for pioneers like Zappos) to table stakes (for everyone else). But the tide is turning. According to logistics provider goTRG, 49% of US retailers now think of Returns as a severe problem, especially during the holiday season. In just the last five years, the Returns rate…
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Product/Market Fit has emerged as a key threshold of success for startups, but the concept can apply to businesses of any size. First coined by Benchmark co-founder Andy Rachleff, Product/Market Fit was popularized by Marc Andreesen in 2007 in a famous essay titled “The Only Thing That Matters.” In the essay, Marc defined Product/Market Fit as “being in a good…
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A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon exploring the nonstop drumbeat of change in business, particularly from a marketing perspective. When everything is constantly changing, it’s easy to lose sight of the power of consistency. And yet the flip side of that dynamic is resistance to change, even when change is necessary. A couple years ago, Gartner shared snapshots…
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It’s still early days with AI Generation tools. We’re all still learning the potential and limitations. One watch-out is the bias toward homogeneity — the tendency for AI results to look alike. As AI predicts what to generate, the path of least resistance is an averaging of the content in its source material. Ian Whitworth once referred to this as…
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Marketers are frequently the biggest agents of change in a business. Inside marketing teams, there’s a constant drumbeat for change, particularly when new members join the team. In my first marketing job, junior managers rotated to new brands every 12 months. Each new assignment brought fresh energy to make a mark on the brand. Higher level marketers rotated less frequently…
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“Upskilling” as a business term was coined in the late 70s. But the pressure to “upskill” has never seemed more acute. Andrew Geoghegan, CMO of William Grant & Sons, described the challenge of upskilling for marketers a few months ago: “There used to be significant investment in-house in upskilling teams and building on those core skills and competencies. “Now, though,…
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A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon about the “silo syndrome” that most organizations struggle to navigate. It got me thinking about the challenge of strategic alignment in general — how hard it is to get and keep the extended organization on the same page. A big part of the marketing job is learning to manage by influence —…
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I was struck by an observation from J. Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer at Kantar: “The foundational prerequisite of growth is the courage to grow. Impediments to growth sit within a company itself. Growth is rarely hostage to the marketplace.” I like the idea that a brand is not “hostage to the marketplace” — that marketers can take agency for…
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My cartoons are often inspired by something I overheard the previous week. Last week, I traveled to speak at the GPeC Summit in Romania and got to hear UnMarketing author Scott Stratten’s entertaining take on marketing while I was there. Part of Scott’s talk included a rant on vanity metrics — the seductive allure of focusing on data that makes…
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