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’ve always been fascinated with how marketing teams make decisions, particularly how they try to tap into consumer insights. Any form of consumer research is an inexact science. Focus group glass can distort insights like a fun house mirror. It can easily be shaped by the team’s own biases and politics. Quotes can be cherry-picked to support a predetermined decision. …
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I recently met Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast, at Marketing Festival in Brno. He gave a fascinating talk on the state of content marketing. Several of his observations resonated with me, including the insularity of using the same search engine optimization checklists as everyone else as a starting point to create anything. The result is a pool…
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The quality of marketing leads is an age-old sales gripe, captured best by Glengarry Glen Ross, the classic 1984 David Mamet play turned 1992 movie. Salesman Shelley Levene is constantly complaining that the leads are “weak”, and the focus of the plot is the question of who stole the golden “Glengarry” leads. In B2B marketing, we have much better tools…
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The future of search is ask. The future of results is answer. I like how Carl Holden at Zellus Marketing described the shift in how we’re all going to be navigating the Internet: “Since the turn of the millennium, the verb “search” has dominated our interaction with the internet—inputting keywords into a box and sifting through a list of results.…
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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.
One of my earliest cartoons (back in January 2003) showed a large gathering of people socializing at a Super Bowl party and a guy saying “Time to come back! The commercials are starting again!” The Super Bowl is the one time every year when ordinary people actively seek out advertising. I found a reference to a 2021 survey (but couldn’t…
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“AI suffers from an unrelenting, incurable case of vagueness,” Eric Siegel told BBC reporter James Clayton. At the same time, Gartner pegged Generative AI in its most recent Hype Cycle as being on the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” That combined “vagueness” and “hype” is a recipe for “AI-powered” being applied indiscriminately across just about anything. Wired described CES 2024 a…
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“Our ‘Aha moments’ are literally quiet brain signals.” I like this observation from Dr. David Rock I came across in a NYT article on the impact of modern distractions. With modern work culture wired for always-on communication, finding the space and time for “Aha moments” is a challenge. We have to be deliberate if we want to create space for…
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I recently stumbled across this observation on innovation from Ger Perdisatt of Microsoft: “Often, companies talk a good game about innovation, but when these aspirations bump up against the realpolitik of running corporate organizations, there is typically only one winner: the status quo.” The pressure of the status quo is strong. Champions of innovation have to navigate a complex organizational…
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In the 20+ years I’ve been drawing this cartoon series, one evergreen topic I’ve loved exploring is how brands sometimes twist into pretzels trying to appeal to new generations, often with hilarious unintended effects. Advice often comes in the form of a 5-step checklist — or a “one weird trick” — that magically promises to make brands appealing to the…
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“Free Returns” has become the new “Free Shipping,” which is creating a massive logistical headache for retailers, particularly in the weeks after Christmas. This year, shoppers in the US returned 14.5% of the items they purchased, valued at $743 billion. That’s nearly double the return rates of pre-pandemic 2019. One third of shoppers now make returns part of their…
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I’ve been thinking lately about an observation from Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard: “Advertising has a bad reputation as a content crap trap … “In this digital age we’re producing thousands of new ads, posts, tweets, every week, every month, every year. We eventually concluded all we were doing was adding to the noise.” Marc shared this…
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We’re nearing the twenty-fifth anniversary of Seth Godin’s prescient book, Permission Marketing. Published in early 1999, Permission Marketing set the stage for modern marketing. Many of the marketing tools, channels, and technology have changed or evolved in the past quarter-century (although email has surprisingly remained a fixture), but the ideal of Permission Marketing is as relevant as ever. Even as…
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I’ve drawn a number of cartoons over the years on the evolving Chief Marketing Officer role, which is partly a proxy for the ever-changing job of marketing in general. Long gone are the days when CMOs were just in charge of “marketing comms” and marketing was dismissively described as “the coloring-in department.” Today’s Chief Marketing Officer role is almost impossibly…
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One of the mythical holy grails of marketing is to be able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Easier said than done. Despite all the focus on customer journeys, we’re still operating in the dark on what customers are actually looking for, much of the time. Even the latest marketing tech stack…
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We can’t break through the clutter by adding to it. Yet the majority of marketing communication just creates more of the same. I recently caught up with Adam Morgan, founder of eatbigfish, and learned about a project he’s developing to quantify the cost of being dull (and the opportunity to be more interesting). As Adam put it: “Dull is expensive…
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A recent survey from Funnel and Ravn Research found that 64% of marketers fear AI will replace their jobs in the next five years, and three in four worry that AI will impact their pay or value. Whether or not we’re feeling that fear ourselves, members of our teams likely are. That’s a key factor to take into account when…
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Kevin Jordan-Deen, SVP at Colgate-Palmolive, encouraged me last week to re-imagine and re-create a “Share of Wallet” cartoon I originally drew in 2009 during the “Great Recession”. When I drew the original cartoon, I was GM for the recently launched Method brand in the UK. Much of the recessionary marketing climate at the time was centered on belt-tightening, private…
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On Friday, Professor Scott Galloway released ProfG.ai, a “digital twin” trained on his writing and capable of answering questions in his voice. That’s just one of many experiments with different models on how generative AI can impact the future of work. A few weeks ago, BCG released the results of a fascinating Harvard-led study that researched how more…
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In 2005, A.G. Lafley, CEO of the world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, introduced the concept of “moments of truth” to the marketing world. As he wrote in the P&G Annual Report that year: “The best brands consistently win two moments of truth. The first moment occurs at the store shelf, when a consumer decides whether to buy one brand…
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Marketers are the first to get bored by their own marketing. Particularly when a new leader joins a brand team, there’s a common bias in marketing that what will drive growth is to change everything everywhere all at once. Given the revolving door of many marketing roles, the cycle can repeat with each leadership change. While brands need fresh…
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