Fun & Humor

Take a break from the grind with a little break for fun and humor.

  1. Fun & Humor

Top of Mind

In 2005, I drew a cartoon with a consumer and a brand tying the knot in a wedding ceremony. In her vows, the consumer says: “And I promise to be loyal, forsaking all other brands, unless your competitor is on deal, you’re out-of-stock or you’re just not meeting my need states at the time.” That […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Cannes Lions Humblebrags

Around 15,000 marketers descend this week on the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. And everyone else will feel like we’re there. As Agency SOS Founder John Kovacevich wrote a few years ago: “Prepare yourselves. Your (highly-placed, senior-level, expense-account-having) advertising friends are about to flood your feed with yacht and rosé […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

New Self-Serving Study

Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has long been on the frontlines of debunking marketing myths, starting with “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know” in 2010. Byron recently introduced me to the term SONK — “the Scientific-cation Of Non-Knowledge.” In an interview last year, Byron credits SONK to his mentor Andrew Ehrenberg. As Byron […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Brand Origin Stories and Faux-thenticity

Fake authenticity (or “faux-thenticity”) has long plagued marketing. Authenticity is set up as a sort of holy grail in branding, marked as an objective in countless creative briefs. The “origin story” in particular is a common lever to manufacture authenticity. Yet most framing of the origin story is heavily scripted, edited, and contrived. The more […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Unprecedented with Precedent

I drew this week’s cartoon on a paradox I keep seeing in innovation. Henry Ford famously said: “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.” Ford’s original motor company cribbed ideas and inspiration everywhere from Singer sewing machines to P&G to Chicago slaughterhouses. Those borrowed […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Content about Content about Content

I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by today’s content overload and the circular creator economy. When I left college in the 90s, I moved to Prague and found a job at Velvet, an English-language magazine for the booming but close-knit expat scene. At that strange time when Eastern Europe opened up, there were more than […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Misalignment at Speed

A friend sent me a William Blair research report this week that characterized enterprise AI adoption as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Just about every organization has started to use AI tools in some fashion. But there’s little orchestration of how those tools are actually used. And very little alignment across the enterprise. […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Human Made

This week’s cartoon goes out to my friend Ann Handley, who has been putting up a valiant defense for the em dash (—). As Ann put it recently: “People are patrolling the streets, rounding up em dashes like it’s CSI: Grammar Unit. “Use one in a paragraph? That means you’re secretly AI! You’re generating your […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Storytelling and AI

LinkedIn reported that the percentage of US job postings that include the term “storyteller” doubled last year from the year before. Katie Deighton recently wrote about this in the WSJ: “Marketing and technology companies have often repurposed grandiose descriptions from other arenas to lend corporate office roles additional sparkle. While the heyday of technology gurus, […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Human in the Loop

I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by some of the latest growing pains of human-AI collaboration. As AI gets more autonomous, the traditional “human in the loop” oversight model is showing strain. With pressure to “10X productivity” with fleets of AI agents, how best to keep up with the avalanche and complexity of approvals? The […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Brands Chasing Youth

The marketing industry’s obsession with youth is nothing new.  Thinking about what makes the next generation of consumers tick is a perennial activity. Generic one-size-fits-all advice on how to crack the code on Gen Z (age 16-29) and Gen Alpha (age 0-16) circulates constantly. Sometimes these generations are awkwardly bundled together as “Gen Zalpha.” Much […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Planning for Uncertainty

Almost exactly 6 years ago, as things started to shut down for Covid, I drew a cartoon about the challenges of planning in a time of uncertainty. An executive holds up a coin and says, “We need to update our forecast. Heads, this will blow over soon. Tails, it’s the end of the world.” At […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

AI Org Chart

My AI Mad Libs cartoon last week on urgency without clarity in AI strategy was one of my most licensed cartoons from the last 24 years. It got me thinking of the trickle-down effects of muddled strategy through an organization. Whenever there’s ill-defined strategy at the top, there will be poor alignment all the way […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

AI Strategy

We’re in a strange time of urgency without clarity in AI adoption. The pressure is on to adopt everything everywhere all at once. A case in point is agentic AI. Suddenly the term “agentic” is used indiscriminately in everything from strategy decks to marketing copy. Even simple chatbots are being called agents. The pace seems […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

The Marketing Plan

A few year ago, Mark Ritson wrote a handy guide to creating a marketing plan and critiqued those who make “PowerPoint decks by the yard.” Mark wrote: “Most marketing plans are PowerPoint presentations. Nothing wrong with that. But they are just too damned long – 50, 100, 200 slides in a plan. This is a […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Advertising, Brand Recall, and Celebrities

Super Bowl ads have always juggled story power and star power. But the overall swing toward celebrities has been an ongoing trend. In 2010, just 31% of Super Bowl ads included a famous face. Last year, a whopping 68% of Super Bowl ads featured celebrities and 51% featured multiple celebrities, according to iSpot.tv and EMARKETER. […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

5 Stages of AI Adoption

Steve Jobs famously described the computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Last week, my old friend Jason Copeland invited me to join a Silicon Valley roundtable he moderated with a fascinating topic: “Will AI be a bicycle for the mind? Or an autopilot to which we passively delegate human judgment and creativity? “We’re biologically […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Customer Personas

Marketers use have long used personas as a tool to try to bring customers into the room — to help organizations be more customer-centric. They’re intended to help with everything from innovation to experience design to marketing and sales. A software engineer named Alan Cooper is credited with creating the first persona in 1985. Looking […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Innovation Funnel

Many organizations use some form 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. By […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Marketing Metrics and Technoplasmosis

I recently spoke at a conference with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, and he shared a fascinating insight about the influence of ad platforms on how we think about marketing. Rory said that many of the metrics that marketers chase are not designed to serve the brand. They’re designed to serve the platforms that […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Brand Visibility in AI

There’s an old search engine joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results. When search engines are the primary mode of finding information, brands do everything they can to be on the first page. That includes SEO tactics to become one of the ten blue links […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

My Favorite Marketoons of 2025

My friend Ann Handley once described my cartoons as a type of diary, which rings true to me. Since 2002, I’ve drawn this cartoon series as a kind of open diary to help make sense of whatever I’m noticing around me. As we wrap up 2025, here are some of my personal favorite diary moments […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Making a List, Checking it Twice

Businesses have never had greater and more varied data at their disposal. But the stubborn issue of data silos continues to plague what they can do with it. AI alone can’t fix this. AI is only as useful as the quality of the data that it has access to. And all the hype and promise […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Decades of Marketing

I originally drew a version of this cartoon before the AI boom. ChatGPT launched three years ago this week, and completely changed the trajectory of the decade. (The original panel I drew for the 2020s involved the metaverse, which already seems so dated.) It’s a good reminder things are always in flux in marketing. And […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Chasing the Algorithm

The algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away. When Facebook first introduced the News Feed in 2006, posts appeared in chronological order. In 2009, they introduced their first algorithm to sort based on popularity. LinkedIn introduced an algorithmic feed in 2012, Twitter in 2014, and Instagram in 2016. All the algorithms continue to change and […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Smartify Everything

One of the most popular cartoons I ever drew was about the Internet of Things, right after Google announced the acquisition of Nest in early 2014. “I think my Nest smoke alarm is going off,” one character tells another. “Google Adwords just pitched me a fire extinguisher and an offer for temporary housing.” iRobot later […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

AI Productivity and Workslop

GenAI prompts are getting pushier. From productivity apps to search to social media, users have to navigate a constant array of pop-ups, tooltips, and moving icons pushing GenAI features for just about every task. And yet the result is not automatically better output or higher productivity. BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab recently published […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

B2C, B2B, and Business-to-Human

There has long been a chasm between B2C and B2B marketing. At an event recently, I was asked about humor in marketing, and whether it was more appropriate for B2C than B2B. Part of my answer was that humor could be even more effective in B2B marketing because the bar is so low. B2B marketing […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Bot or Not

Recently I was nearly defeated by a restaurant mobile website. I somehow managed to fail a THIRD visual CAPTCHA puzzle asking me to identify something in a blurry image grid before I could order a burrito. The next day, I chuckled at a news story describing a ChatGPT Agent that casually and successfully passed CAPTCHA […]
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  1. Fun & Humor

Walmart to Expand Digital Shelf Labels Chainwide

Walmart will deploy digital shelf labels (DSLs) chainwide this year, doubling the approximately 2,300 U.S. locations currently using the technology (Walmart U.S. operates more than 4,600 stores). With more than 120,000 items in a typical Walmart store, managing price changes manually requires significant associate hours. Additionally, these DSLs are equipped with LED lights that make […]
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