Tom Fishburne
Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne, a veteran marketer and cartoonist. Tom is the author of "Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings."​ Marketoonist is a cartoon studio focused on content marketing with a sense of humor. We create marketoon campaigns designed to be content worth sharing https://marketoonist.com/

Tom Fishburne's articles

  1. Technology & Innovation

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. CPG & FMCG

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Technology & Innovation

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. Department: Nonfood

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Corporate Strategy

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Corporate Strategy

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. Agencies & Vendors

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Department: Nonfood

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Media & Marketing

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 […]
4 min read
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  1. Channel: Ecommerce & Digital

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Technology & Innovation

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 […]
4 min read
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  1. Corporate Strategy

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 […]
3 min read
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