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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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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“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 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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One of my favorite marketing observations comes from HP founder David Packard: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” Our customers don’t care about our org charts. They don’t care which department is responsible for what. When they interact with different parts of a business, all they see is one brand. That means that every functional…
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Mike Tyson was asked his thoughts on Evander Holyfield’s fight plan before a WBA Heavyweight Title bout and famously responded: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” As we shift from Q3 to Q4 this week, brand planning season is in full swing for 2025, even as final 2024 numbers come into clearer view. The process…
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A few months ago, I heard Adam Morgan from eatbigfish and Jon Evans from System1 give a talk on the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull at the Cannes advertising festival. Adam and Jon shared analysis from Peter Field who found that a “dull” advertising campaign has to spend £10m more a year in media on average to get the same…
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Peter Drucker wrote this in his 1973 book on management: “You have to produce results in the short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term. And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.” Business carries a bias toward short-termism in general, but particularly in marketing and advertising. There’s a fundamental…
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In 1966, Abraham Maslow, originator of the Hierarchy of Needs, made this well-known observation: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This type of cognitive bias became known as Maslow’s hammer or the Law of the Instrument. I’ve been thinking about that line in the current…
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Earlier this year an editorial in the New York Times wondered: “When did everything become a ‘journey’? Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re ‘journeys.’” And of course, to marketers, there’s the “customer journey.” The customer journey is a handy metaphor to help us consider all of the interactions and experiences…
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Conventional wisdom holds that creativity comes from “thinking outside the box”, but constraints are actually one of its key ingredients. One of Google’s principles of innovation is “creativity loves constraints,” as Marissa Mayer once recounted: “People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of the little…
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I’ve always liked this insight from Seth Godin: “If failure is not an option, then neither is success.” Organizations can spot the risks of a new idea a mile away. But there’s a curious blind spot when it comes to the risks of not taking those risks. The path of least resistance is to play it safe and keep as…
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In 2008, I brought my team to see Seth Godin speak at an event in London. There was a Q&A at the end, and someone asked Seth how he found time to do all the things he did — write so many books, keep a daily blog, and personally respond to every email he receives. Seth’s answer left an impression…
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It’s hard to read the tea leaves on the future of work with AI. There are such wild extremes between the predictions of techno-utopian boosters and techno-dystopian doomers. It’s exciting and scary at the same time and no one really knows how this will go. I keep coming back to HBS professor Karim Lakhani’s oft-quoted observation from last year: “AI…
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The recent CrowdStrike debacle gives lessons for all of us in how to (and how not to) communicate in a crisis. The initial tweeted response from CEO George Kurtz fell flat, as panned by comms expert Davia Temin: “This is a response scrubbed by a legal team with lawsuits in mind. It holds little to no accountability, which is what…
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Brand storytelling is one of the most wildly overused (and least understood) buzzwords of marketing. It’s often casually used without discretion to describe just about any type of marketing communication. Years ago, I visited the Portland studio of Character, which helped pioneer storytelling as a framework for brands, and chatted with Jim Hardison and David Altschul. Part of what…
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Labeling an idea polarizing can be the quickest way to kill an idea. Businesses usually avoid ideas that are polarizing, whether new products or campaigns. It’s always easier to launch the next flavor of vanilla. But there’s power in polarization. By trying to appeal to everyone, you won’t necessarily appeal to anyone in particular. In a world of clutter, the…
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One of the most entertaining parts of going to the Cannes Advertising festival for the first time recently was eavesdropping on so much marketing chatter in one place. It was surreal to walk the cobblestone streets past cafe tables and hear, not French, but snippets of conversation with language like “brand salience” and “mental availability.” It reminded me how easy…
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