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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At the Cannes Lions a few months ago, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar and CFO Sachin Mehra gave a joint talk on the CMO/CFO relationship called “Happy Tension.” Raja described the typical dynamic this way: “It’s shocking that less than 40% of the finance people think that marketers can make sound commercial decisions, leaving the remaining 60% on the negative side. …
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Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly prioritized his work life by classifying tasks as important or not important, and urgent or not urgent. The resulting two-by-two graph became known as The Eisenhower Matrix and it influenced a lot of thinking in work productivity. We generally spend far too much on work that is urgent but not important. As Stephen Covey famously summarized…
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In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori introduced the concept of the “uncanny valley.” In designing robots to be more human-like, he observed that people respond positively only up to a point. Then there’s an “uncanny valley” where the “almost-human” design seems creepy and people experience “revulsion.” If you watched the 2004 movie The Polar Express, you may…
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Net Promoter Score (NPS) turns 20 later this year. What Bain consultant Fred Reichheld first introduced in a HBR article in December 2003 is now ubiquitous. The “how likely are you to recommend” question is asked endlessly after customer experiences, large and small. The metric that this question generates is now tracked by two-thirds of the Fortune 1000. …
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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 love the analogy of ChatGPT that Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah shared at the start of the year: “Netscape was to the Internet what ChatGPT is to Artificial Intelligence. “The Internet existed before Netscape. But the browser helped millions of mere mortals connect the dots on what could be done, and dream of what could be.” As this breakout year…
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Nearly 10 years ago, I drew one of my most popular cartoons that showed a Peeping Tom looking through the window of a living room at a couple. One says, “Don’t worry, it’s only marketers collecting our personal data so they can create more relevant advertising for us.” Third-party cookies have been at the center of the consumer privacy debate…
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“Gen Z had a profound impact on how brands approached their consumer experiences, but companies will need to brace themselves even more for the changes Gen Alpha will infuse… “They aren’t just digital natives; these are digital ninjas, and whether brands are ready or not, they’re coming.” This comment is from Razorfish President Dani Mariano, on the announcement of a…
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“In some organizations, just the expectations of CMOs are just so out of whack with the reality of what a CMO can really deliver on the timelines, and with the resources and with the headwinds that they have… “I think that in some organizations, you’re just being set up to fail, right?” Gartner analyst Chris Ross shared this perspective in…
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Meta debuted their own version of Twitter a couple weeks ago called Threads. The launch created a fire drill for many a marketing team, deciding whether to jump in and if so, in what way. Part of the alarm was caused by the record user growth of the app. At 100 million users in five days (certainly aided by the…
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I’ve drawn a few different cartoons over the years riffing on Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 classic, “Crossing the Chasm.” I once had the opportunity to give him the original of one of these when we spoke at the same Silicon Valley conference. Given the faddish nature of conventional wisdom in marketing, I particularly appreciate models like these that can stand the…
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“Price promotions are a drug. They are the crack cocaine of marketing. I hope we’ve seen an end to the senseless promotions that we’ve seen.” Les Binet, group head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, shared these thoughts at last year’s IPA’s Global Effectiveness conference. Much of the spike in sales that brands see during a price promotion subsidizes consumers who…
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The WSJ had a great feature last week on Chipotle and the “Keithadilla.” It was a fascinating case study on the state of innovation in the age of TikTok trends. In late 2022, a TikTok influencer named Keith Lee reinterpreted the Chipotle Quesadilla as an off-menu hack that included a DIY sauce combining Chipotle-Honey Vinaigrette and sour cream. Chipotle…
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Salesforce recently found that 67% of senior IT leaders are pushing to adopt generative AI across their businesses in the next 18 months, with one-third naming it their top priority. At the same time, a majority of these senior IT leaders have concerns about what could happen. Among other reservations, the report found that 59% believe generative AI outputs…
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Scott Galloway had an interesting take on Apple’s Vision Pro announcement last week: “It will officially be the most elegant final nail in the coffin of this sort of headset-driven VR consensual hallucination.” If it’s a “headset-driven VR consensual hallucination,” it includes not only the tech players, but all of the brands that jumped on the metaverse bandwagon in the…
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“Maybe AI will help you work. But more likely, you’ll be working for AI.” Ian Bogost made this observation a few months ago in the Atlantic, and it stuck with me. As organizations scramble to incorporate AI, no one knows quite how AI will impact the future of work. Will productivity gains be offset by, as Ian Bogost put it,…
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Braze recently reported that the average smartphone user receives over 40 push notifications a day. The Atlantic pegged the daily number of push notifications even higher, between 50 and 80. Here’s how Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull categorized push notifications last week: “Push notifications may indeed be the smartphone’s defining feature. They are, if nothing else, a perfect avatar of…
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Where an ad appears can sometimes communicate more than the ad itself. Keith Browning, LinkedIn’s brand marketing global lead, shared an interesting analogy a few years ago on the relative importance of content and context. He recounted an experiment by Joshua Bell, one of the top violinists in the world. One day, Joshua stepped onto a metro stop in DC…
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Thorsten Strauss recently sent a funny observation to me that “ the Prompt Engineer is the new Growth Hacker.” The AI Prompt Engineer is suddenly an in-demand job, as organizations scramble how to work with generative AI. Insider recently reported salaries up to $375k for prompt engineers, even for those without a tech background. It’s currently a seller’s market and…
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“The plural of anecdote is not data,” the old aphorism goes. I think the inverse is also interesting: “The singular of data is not anecdote.” Marcus Collins, Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York, made the following observation a couple years ago: “Though the amount of data available to marketers has increased exponentially over time, our ability to extract insight…
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This cartoon is less about focus groups than how we often use focus groups. Or really any type of market research. Years ago, I overheard some agency friends joke about “the Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Eden Prairie is a suburb of Minneapolis, where a lot of focus groups happen. These agency friends went on to describe the strange…
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