Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
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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