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Marketoonist | 'Tom Fishburne' Cartoon Powered Marketing - Marketing
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7 Deadly Sins of Data-Driven Marketing cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
My cartoons are often inspired by something I overheard the previous week. Last week, I traveled to speak at the GPeC Summit in Romania and got to hear UnMarketing author Scott Stratten’s entertaining take on marketing while I was there. Part of Scott’s talk included a rant on vanity metrics — the seductive allure of
The Silo Syndrome cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
One of my favorite marketing observations comes from HP founder David Packard: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” Our customers don’t care about our org charts. They don’t care which department is responsible for what. When they interact with different parts of a business, all they see is one brand.
Brand Planning cartoon- Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Mike Tyson was asked his thoughts on Evander Holyfield’s fight plan before a WBA Heavyweight Title bout and famously responded: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” As we shift from Q3 to Q4 this week, brand planning season is in full swing for 2025, even as final 2024 numbers come
Creative Review by Committee cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
A few months ago, I heard Adam Morgan from eatbigfish and Jon Evans from System1 give a talk on the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull at the Cannes advertising festival. Adam and Jon shared analysis from Peter Field who found that a “dull” advertising campaign has to spend £10m more a year in media on
Sales-Focused Advertising cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Peter Drucker wrote this in his 1973 book on management: “You have to produce results in the short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term. And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.” Business carries a bias toward short-termism in general, but particularly in marketing
AI is a Tool cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
In 1966, Abraham Maslow, originator of the Hierarchy of Needs, made this well-known observation: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This type of cognitive bias became known as Maslow’s hammer or the Law of the Instrument. I’ve been thinking about
Customer Journeys to Nowhere cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Earlier this year an editorial in the New York Times wondered: “When did everything become a ‘journey’? Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re ‘journeys.’” And of course, to marketers, there’s the “customer journey.” The customer journey is a handy metaphor to help us consider all
Thinking Outside the Box cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Conventional wisdom holds that creativity comes from “thinking outside the box”, but constraints are actually one of its key ingredients. One of Google’s principles of innovation is “creativity loves constraints,” as Marissa Mayer once recounted: “People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their
Playing it Safe is Risky - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I’ve always liked this insight from Seth Godin: “If failure is not an option, then neither is success.” Organizations can spot the risks of a new idea a mile away. But there’s a curious blind spot when it comes to the risks of not taking those risks. The path of least resistance is to play
Thought Leadership cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
In 2008, I brought my team to see Seth Godin speak at an event in London. There was a Q&A at the end, and someone asked Seth how he found time to do all the things he did — write so many books, keep a daily blog, and personally respond to every email he receives.
Future of AI cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
It’s hard to read the tea leaves on the future of work with AI. There are such wild extremes between the predictions of techno-utopian boosters and techno-dystopian doomers. It’s exciting and scary at the same time and no one really knows how this will go. I keep coming back to HBS professor Karim Lakhani’s oft-quoted
Corporate Apology cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
The recent CrowdStrike debacle gives lessons for all of us in how to (and how not to) communicate in a crisis. The initial tweeted response from CEO George Kurtz fell flat, as panned by comms expert Davia Temin: “This is a response scrubbed by a legal team with lawsuits in mind. It holds little to
Brand Storytelling, Showmanship, and Salesmanship cartoon- Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Brand storytelling is one of the most wildly overused (and least understood) buzzwords of marketing. It’s often casually used without discretion to describe just about any type of marketing communication. Years ago, I visited the Portland studio of Character, which helped pioneer storytelling as a framework for brands, and chatted with Jim Hardison and
Idea Killers cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Labeling an idea polarizing can be the quickest way to kill an idea. Businesses usually avoid ideas that are polarizing, whether new products or campaigns. It’s always easier to launch the next flavor of vanilla. But there’s power in polarization. By trying to appeal to everyone, you won’t necessarily appeal to anyone in particular. In
Chief Buzzword Officer cartoon- Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
One of the most entertaining parts of going to the Cannes Advertising festival for the first time recently was eavesdropping on so much marketing chatter in one place. It was surreal to walk the cobblestone streets past cafe tables and hear, not French, but snippets of conversation with language like “brand salience” and “mental availability.”
Return from Cannes Lions ’24: Creativity - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Here’s my cartoon recap from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. System1 invited me to sketch a daily cartoon based on what I observed, walking around with my sketchpad for the week. This one is about the transition back to regular work at the end. Even if you haven’t been to this
Dispatch from Cannes Lions ’24: Marketing Effectiveness - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has been on my bucket list ever since I started in marketing. I’m here for the first time this week thanks to System1 — who I’ve known since their Brainjuicer days. They invited me to be a Marketoonist-in-Residence for the week, so I’m going to capture some of
Anecdotes and Data cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
There’s a well-known aphorism that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” I found it interesting to learn that the origin of that line was actually the opposite. In the late 60s, a Cal Professor and political scientist named Ray Wolfinger heard a student dismiss a statement as “just an anecdote” and responded that “the
AI Chatbots and GenAI Hype cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
We’re at a surreal stage of generative AI adoption, as some of the growing pains of this still relatively new technology are revealed in funny and bizarre ways. Google released “AI Overviews” at scale in the US recently, giving everyone an opportunity to kick the tires and ask Google questions answered by AI, which then
Guessing the Brief cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I stumbled across a quote recently from legendary ad agency founder Pat Fallon: “If the creative brief is not itself creative, what right do its authors have to expect anything different?” The brief is often treated as a formality or a tick-box exercise, rather than one of the most important tools in a marketer’s toolkit.
Market Share and Competitor Obsession cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I’m returning from giving a keynote talk in Europe on different types of marketing myopia, and gave some thought this week to category myopia. There’s a famous Jeff Bezos quote attributed to an early Amazon shareholder letter: “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs, and then we work
Marketing Math cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
Marketers learning to speak the language of the CFO has been a running theme in my cartoons over the years. Even as marketing has become more data-driven, there’s still a gap between marketing and the rest of the organization. Last year, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar brought his CFO Sachin Mehra to the Cannes Lions to
AI Co-Pilots and the Future of Work cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I like the analogy of AI as a “co-pilot.” Microsoft largely popularized this model — now branding all of their AI tools as “Copilot,” from GitHub to a new “Copilot” key that is even part of the PC keyboard. But it will be interesting to see how the role of “co” in the “co-pilot” model
Marketing Seat at the Table cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
“A sign of success by any marketer is if they get sponsorship around the boardroom table.” I like this observation from Abigail Comber, former CMO at Debenhams. It’s a reminder of how much of the marketing role is an inside job — the ability of marketers to influence the rest of the organization. MarketingWeek reported
Market Research cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
This cartoon is partly inspired by a classic quote attributed to David Ogilvy: “The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think and they don't do what they say.” That’s not to say that that market research isn’t important. But directly asking consumers what they
The Large Print Giveth cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
In 1976, Tom Waits released his classic song “Step Right Up”, a hilarious rant on the state of advertising. It’s an anthem to all the bad marketing clichés of the time with lyrics about “year-end clearances” and “50% off” messages jockeying for attention. He closes with a line that inspired this cartoon: “The large print
Potential of AI cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
“We approach the integration of AI with a mixture of excitement and caution,” Kate Seymour, marketing director at CMYK, said recently. She captured I think how many businesses are thinking about AI. She went on: “While we recognise the vast potential AI holds for enhancing our own marketing strategies and improving the services we offer
Behind the Focus Group Glass cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I’ve always been fascinated with how marketing teams make decisions, particularly how they try to tap into consumer insights. Any form of consumer research is an inexact science. Focus group glass can distort insights like a fun house mirror. It can easily be shaped by the team’s own biases and politics. Quotes can be cherry-picked
Writing and SEO Word Soup cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I recently met Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast, at Marketing Festival in Brno. He gave a fascinating talk on the state of content marketing. Several of his observations resonated with me, including the insularity of using the same search engine optimization checklists as everyone else as a starting point to create anything.
Marketing Handoff to Sales cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
The quality of marketing leads is an age-old sales gripe, captured best by Glengarry Glen Ross, the classic 1984 David Mamet play turned 1992 movie. Salesman Shelley Levene is constantly complaining that the leads are “weak”, and the focus of the plot is the question of who stole the golden “Glengarry” leads. In B2B marketing,
Future of Search - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
The future of search is ask. The future of results is answer. I like how Carl Holden at Zellus Marketing described the shift in how we’re all going to be navigating the Internet: “Since the turn of the millennium, the verb "search" has dominated our interaction with the internet—inputting keywords into a box and sifting
Super Bowl Ad Playbook cartoon- Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
One of my earliest cartoons (back in January 2003) showed a large gathering of people socializing at a Super Bowl party and a guy saying “Time to come back! The commercials are starting again!” The Super Bowl is the one time every year when ordinary people actively seek out advertising. I found a reference to
AI Washing cartoon- Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
“AI suffers from an unrelenting, incurable case of vagueness,” Eric Siegel told BBC reporter James Clayton. At the same time, Gartner pegged Generative AI in its most recent Hype Cycle as being on the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” That combined “vagueness” and “hype” is a recipe for “AI-powered” being applied indiscriminately across just about anything.
Staying Focused cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
“Our ‘Aha moments’ are literally quiet brain signals.” I like this observation from Dr. David Rock I came across in a NYT article on the impact of modern distractions. With modern work culture wired for always-on communication, finding the space and time for “Aha moments” is a challenge. We have to be deliberate if we
Navigating Innovation cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I recently stumbled across this observation on innovation from Ger Perdisatt of Microsoft: “Often, companies talk a good game about innovation, but when these aspirations bump up against the realpolitik of running corporate organizations, there is typically only one winner: the status quo.” The pressure of the status quo is strong. Champions of innovation have
Gen Z is not a Monolith cartoon- Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
In the 20+ years I’ve been drawing this cartoon series, one evergreen topic I’ve loved exploring is how brands sometimes twist into pretzels trying to appeal to new generations, often with hilarious unintended effects. Advice often comes in the form of a 5-step checklist — or a “one weird trick” — that magically promises to
Happy (Product) Returns cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
“Free Returns” has become the new “Free Shipping,” which is creating a massive logistical headache for retailers, particularly in the weeks after Christmas. This year, shoppers in the US returned 14.5% of the items they purchased, valued at $743 billion. That’s nearly double the return rates of pre-pandemic 2019. One third of shoppers now
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like AI-Generated Content cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I’ve been thinking lately about an observation from Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard: “Advertising has a bad reputation as a content crap trap … “In this digital age we’re producing thousands of new ads, posts, tweets, every week, every month, every year. We eventually concluded all we were doing was adding to
Permission Marketing cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
We’re nearing the twenty-fifth anniversary of Seth Godin’s prescient book, Permission Marketing. Published in early 1999, Permission Marketing set the stage for modern marketing. Many of the marketing tools, channels, and technology have changed or evolved in the past quarter-century (although email has surprisingly remained a fixture), but the ideal of Permission Marketing is as
Many Hats of the CMO cartoon - Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne
I’ve drawn a number of cartoons over the years on the evolving Chief Marketing Officer role, which is partly a proxy for the ever-changing job of marketing in general. Long gone are the days when CMOs were just in charge of “marketing comms” and marketing was dismissively described as “the coloring-in department.” Today’s Chief Marketing