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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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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“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.
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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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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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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