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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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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“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.
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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Here’s my cartoon recap from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. System1 invited me to sketch a daily cartoon based on what I observed, walking around with my sketchpad for the week. This one is about the transition back to regular work at the end. Even if you haven’t been to this festival, hopefully you can relate…
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The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has been on my bucket list ever since I started in marketing. I’m here for the first time this week thanks to System1 — who I’ve known since their Brainjuicer days. They invited me to be a Marketoonist-in-Residence for the week, so I’m going to capture some of the themes I notice as…
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There’s a well-known aphorism that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” I found it interesting to learn that the origin of that line was actually the opposite. In the late 60s, a Cal Professor and political scientist named Ray Wolfinger heard a student dismiss a statement as “just an anecdote” and responded that “the plural of anecdote is data.”…
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We’re at a surreal stage of generative AI adoption, as some of the growing pains of this still relatively new technology are revealed in funny and bizarre ways. Google released “AI Overviews” at scale in the US recently, giving everyone an opportunity to kick the tires and ask Google questions answered by AI, which then appeared at the top of…
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I stumbled across a quote recently from legendary ad agency founder Pat Fallon: “If the creative brief is not itself creative, what right do its authors have to expect anything different?” The brief is often treated as a formality or a tick-box exercise, rather than one of the most important tools in a marketer’s toolkit. A brief is frequently the…
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I’m returning from giving a keynote talk in Europe on different types of marketing myopia, and gave some thought this week to category myopia. There’s a famous Jeff Bezos quote attributed to an early Amazon shareholder letter: “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs, and then we work back from there.” In contrast,…
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Marketers learning to speak the language of the CFO has been a running theme in my cartoons over the years. Even as marketing has become more data-driven, there’s still a gap between marketing and the rest of the organization. Last year, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar brought his CFO Sachin Mehra to the Cannes Lions to give a joint talk on…
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I like the analogy of AI as a “co-pilot.” Microsoft largely popularized this model — now branding all of their AI tools as “Copilot,” from GitHub to a new “Copilot” key that is even part of the PC keyboard. But it will be interesting to see how the role of “co” in the “co-pilot” model evolves, particularly as AI tools…
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“A sign of success by any marketer is if they get sponsorship around the boardroom table.” I like this observation from Abigail Comber, former CMO at Debenhams. It’s a reminder of how much of the marketing role is an inside job — the ability of marketers to influence the rest of the organization. MarketingWeek reported earlier this month that more…
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This cartoon is partly inspired by a classic quote attributed to David Ogilvy: “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” That’s not to say that that market research isn’t important. But directly asking consumers what they want is inherently flawed. People…
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In 1976, Tom Waits released his classic song “Step Right Up”, a hilarious rant on the state of advertising. It’s an anthem to all the bad marketing clichés of the time with lyrics about “year-end clearances” and “50% off” messages jockeying for attention. He closes with a line that inspired this cartoon: “The large print giveth and the small print…
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“We approach the integration of AI with a mixture of excitement and caution,” Kate Seymour, marketing director at CMYK, said recently. She captured I think how many businesses are thinking about AI. She went on: “While we recognise the vast potential AI holds for enhancing our own marketing strategies and improving the services we offer our clients, we also acknowledge…
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