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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“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a decision,” is a truism strangely popularized both by René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher, and Rush, the prog rock band. We can always analyze more data and write more decision trees, but we never have 100% confidence in how things are going to turn out after making a…
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Last Friday marked 20 years of Marketoonist. On October 21, 2002, I published my very first marketing cartoon, then called Brand Camp. It was a cartoon on the 8 Types of Brand Managers. I had just started as an Associate Marketing Manager at General Mills, working on Yoplait. I emailed this first cartoon to 35 co-workers from my cubicle on…
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There’s nothing spookier this Halloween than some of the headlines. Sapio Research recently found that a whopping 95% of global businesses are concerned about a potential recession, with 45% of US businesses “highly concerned.” Fear can drive a knee-jerk response in a recessionary environment to cut, cut, cut — marketing budgets, media spend, hiring, headcount, R&D investment. In 2010, Harvard…
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This cartoon was partly inspired by reading someone described as the MD of EMEA at VMLY&R, part of WPP. I’ve always found it funny that some of the most successful ad agencies have some of the least imaginative names. The alphabet soup names of many agencies are hard to tell apart, and could be easily mistaken for law firms. …
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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.
Last week I wrote about the “messy, mushy middle” of figuring out where and how we work as more people return to the office. I closed with a funny observation from Andrew Mawson, MD of AWA: “People tried coming into the office and when they got there, they found all they were doing was being on Zoom calls.” Figuring out…
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The Return-to-Office versus Work-from-Home Tug of War continues. Many businesses are getting more insistent with their plans to get staff back in the office more, shifting tactics from offering perks to issuing mandates. In a study from A.Team, 53% of tech leaders said an economic downturn would make it easier to require employees to return to the office. A…
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The nature of the relationships between all the teams across client and agency has a direct impact on the work that comes out. Small areas often overlooked — like how much care is taken in writing briefs or how how much a gauntlet there is to run to get paid — can make a difference in marketing campaigns with the…
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Gary Rogers, former Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream CEO and Levi Strauss Chairman, used to encourage his teams not to obsess too much on “worm races.” “Worm races” were Gary’s nickname for line charts that showed competitive market share over time. He observed that marketers often spent too much time focused on what their competitors were doing and not enough…
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It’s inevitable. As soon as a new social platform starts to attract an audience, brands will follow — sometimes with awkward attempts to “authentically” engage that audience. It can be a tricky dance for marketers when part of the appeal of a platform is the absence of brands. The latest social network wunderkind is BeReal, which was created as a…
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Ad exec Dave Trott once pointed out the dictionary definition of “content” to unpack his distaste for that term in marketing: “Content (noun): everything that is inside a container; the contents of a box.” “So there it is: we’re in the shipping business. That’s what happened to what we used to call ‘the idea.’ The idea has become whatever goes…
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Rutgers professor Shagun Jhaver coined the term “algorithmic anxiety” while researching Airbnb hosts in 2018. He observed the obsessive lengths that hosts were taking to try to boost the rankings of their properties — while not quite sure how the Airbnb algorithm worked or what would make a difference. Shagun described many of these attempts as “folk theories”, like…
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Nike CEO John Donahoe recently gushed about Generation Alpha, the under 12 demographic that comes after Gen Z: “The way most companies look at consumers is ‘well, who’s got disposable income?’ We don’t look at it that way. We look at, who is setting the agenda? Who is the future?” Many marketers are starting to jump on the Gen Alpha…
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A couple years ago, Accenture found that only a third of businesses trust their data enough to use it effectively. Only 27% reported that their data and analytics produce insights and recommendations that are highly actionable. They identified a widening chasm between the amount of data and the value derived from it. They called it the “Data Value Gap.” Some…
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In 2018, WSJ columnist Christopher Mims observed: “Alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you can now add another inalienable right: two-day shipping on practically everything.” This was before Amazon Prime pushed the stakes further to one-day shipping in 2019, expanded even further this year to same-day shipping for 140 metro areas, and announced its Prime Air drone delivery…
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David Ogilvy famously said: “Much of the messy advertising you see on television today is the product of committees. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they should never be allowed to create them.” That observation from the Mad Men era still rings true today. The inherent dynamic of committees to to sand the edges. That’s the path of least resistance. Yet…
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One of the customer experience legacies of the pandemic is the QR code. From ordering in restaurants to finding product info in stores to getting help while traveling, the QR code is now ever-present in our daily customer interactions. Once dismissed as niche, the QR code is gaining steam. Scanning increased 25% in 2020, 15% last year, and is predicted…
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An entrepreneur friend of mine shared that one of the most invariable (and overused) questions he gets asked is what the “moats” are for his start-up. He described the question as a crutch that VCs go to when they don’t know what other questions to ask. As my friend put it: “More troubling is that they are looking for…
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Most organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end. Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. If we’re not careful, the innovation…
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In a volatile business environment like this, there’s often pressure to shift gears (and budgets) from long-term brand building to short-term performance marketing that drive quick sales. I recently re-read Tom Roach’s excellent 2020 essay called “The Wrong and the Short of it.” His piece goes after one of the classic “false choices” in marketing — a binary decision between…
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Unilever is the latest major company to rename the Chief Marketing Officer. Having added the word “Digital” in 2019 as “Chief Digital and Marketing Officer”, they got rid of the word “Marketing” altogether last month to announce the role as “Chief Digital and Commercial Officer.” Announcing her new role, Unilever CDCO Connie Braams said: “And no, before you ask, we’re…
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