Tom Fishburne started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cases as a Harvard Business School student.
From an emailed cartoon to coworkers in 2002, Tom’s Marketoonist series has grown by word of mouth to reach several hundred thousand readers every week and his cartoons have been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and The New York Times. His cartoons have twice appeared on billboard ads in Times Square and once helped win a Guinness World Record.
Tom is a frequent international keynote speaker on innovation, marketing and digital transformation, using cartoons, case studies, and his marketing career to tell the story visually. Tom spoke at the TED headquarters in New York on “The Power of Laughing at Ourselves“. He was Cartoonist-in-Residence and Lecturer for the Stanford GSB course on humor in business and is a repeat lecturer on humor at Harvard Business School.
In 2010, Tom expanded Marketoonist into a cartoon studio focused on content marketing, thought leadership, and culture change. They’ve developed custom marketoon campaigns for over 150 businesses, including Adobe, Kronos, Lenovo Software, Dell, IBM, Russell Reynolds, Pitney Bowes, Deloitte, and DBS Bank.
Tom is the author of “Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings.” He also illustrated 3 business books with Deloitte: “Provoke” (Wall Street Journal Bestseller), “Detonate” (National Bestseller), and “Work Disrupted.”
Tom draws (literally and figuratively) from 20 years in the marketing trenches in the US and Europe. He was Interim Chief Marketing Officer at HotelTonight, Managing Director for International at Method Products, and worked in brand management for Nestle and General Mills. Tom developed web sites for interactive agency iXL and started his marketing career selling advertising for the first English-language magazine in Prague.