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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In 2019, I drew a cartoon poking fun at the explosion of new podcasts, with one podcaster saying to another: “Thank you for being a podcast guest on my new podcast about podcasting for podcasters starting podcasts to podcast to other podcasters.” At that point, Apple claimed 700,000 unique podcasts on iTunes. Then came Covid. In 2020 alone, over a…
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My cartoon last week, “AI Written, AI Read”, has already become one of my more widely shared cartoons ever — nearly a million impressions on LinkedIn alone. Generative AI is clearly on a lot of our minds right now. Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, voiced the level of hype related to Generative AI at a Jasper conference recently: “I think…
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One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used ChatGPT or other AI tools at…
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There’s a counter-intuitive Buddhist line that has stuck with me: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s particularly useful in times of uncertainty or even panic, when the temptation is to follow the herd, or take action for the sake of taking action. Sometimes the best action to take on a situation is no action at all. For me,…
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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.
In last week’s cartoon, I parodied some of my favorite clichés in marketing presentation slides. With just six panels in that cartoon, I had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. One of my other favorite used and abused slides is the ever-present framework, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow first proposed this theory in a…
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Marketing plans too often sound alike, even for completely different brands in completely different industries with completely different objectives. I’ve tried to capture a few common marketing plan slide clichés in this cartoon, but marketing plans can easily swell to hundreds of slides and appendices. They often take the form of what Garr Reynolds once dubbed the “slide-ument” — an…
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What a difference a year (or even a few months) makes. Just last January, I drew a cartoon showing a couple marketers (as legless avatars) standing in a virtual world under a banner that reads, “welcome to our brand experience in the metaverse!” One is saying to the other, “I’m sure consumers will show up ANY minute now.” The…
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Ian Whitworth recently described AI-generated content as “infinite words nobody wants.” He observed: “ChatGPT is here to make us all the same… The Great Same-ening is upon us… “ChatGPT, Jasper and all the rest are powerful conformity machines, giving you the ability to churn out Bible-length material about yourself and your business that’s exactly the same as your competitors.” That’s…
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Whenever budgets are under scrutiny, marketing is one of the first items on the chopping block. Those conversations are more difficult when marketing and finance speak a different language. One of the most important target audiences that marketers need to learn how to market to is their own CFO. I’ve always liked the brand management school of marketing training because…
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One of the most popular cartoons I ever drew was about the Internet of Things, right after Google announced the acquisition of Nest in early 2014. “I think my Nest smoke alarm is going off,” one character tells another. “Google Adwords just pitched me a fire extinguisher and an offer for temporary housing.” iRobot later proved that truth is stranger…
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Doing “more with less” is emerging as a sort of business mantra for 2023. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the term externally and internally this week to talk about the overall business climate. In a memo to staff announcing layoffs, he looked outward: “As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize…
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I’ve drawn a lot of cartoons about the tendency of marketers to want to change everything, all at once, and all the time. There’s an old marketing truism that “marketers get tired of their advertising before consumers do.” The same instinct to change for the sake of change goes for every aspect of marketing, from logos to packaging to agencies.…
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On May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote the famous “Internet Tidal Wave” internal memo at Microsoft. This was a huge wake-up call for the desktop software company at the time. It immediately shifted priorities and resources for Microsoft to go after the nascent World Wide Web. I thought of this “Internet Tidal Wave” moment when I came across a helpful…
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My last cartoon before the holidays was about playing it safe. The other extreme is complete reinvention. There’s truth in Bill Gates’ classic 1996 observation: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” Organizations can get get stuck in a rut and resist change. …
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I drew this cartoon partly in response to two studies that came out this week. They seemed to capture the mixed signals that businesses are grappling with as they look at 2023. The Deloitte “CFO Signals” report partly tracks the risk aversion of CFOs over time. Deloitte found that only 29% of CFOs say this is a good time to…
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This cartoon is a follow-up to a cartoon I drew just four years ago about a kid on Santa’s lap in a different privacy era: “Well, Timmy, if you didn’t want me to see you when you’re sleeping, know when you’re awake, know if you’ve been bad or good, and sell that data to third parties, then you should have…
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Asking for a tip is increasingly part of the customer experience. Partly because of the ubiquitous touch screens now at most points of purchase, tipping has crept to just about every type of transaction — from takeout to self-service frozen yogurt to propane refills to buying a t-shirt at a concert. Service tips of 15-30% are commonly requested before service…
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I recently heard the way marketers speak described as “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning,” which made me laugh. I think “Jargon-Monoxide” is produced by every part of a business, but marketers are particularly adept at “Jargon-Monoxide Poisoning.” It’s ironic that the business discipline in charge of communications has such a hard time communicating what it does without jargon. There are multiple…
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There’s a funny conspiracy theory that the Internet secretly “died” six years ago — and is now mostly filled with bots communicating with other bots. As Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in the Atlantic last year: “‘Dead-internet theory’ suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence … “YouTube, for a time, had such high bot traffic that…
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No matter how sophisticated the tools have gotten or how rich the data, I find it funny how much of marketing and sales still rely on blunt force, one-size-fits-all lead generation tactics like these. This scattershot approach is often described as “spray and pray” — broadcasting generic messages to large groups in hopes that a small percentage will magically…
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