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. CPG: HBC

What’s the Marketing ROI?

At the Cannes Lions a few months ago, Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar and CFO Sachin Mehra gave a joint talk on the CMO/CFO relationship called “Happy Tension.”  Raja described the typical dynamic this way: “It’s shocking that less than 40% of the finance people think that marketers can make sound commercial decisions, leaving the remaining […]
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  1. Department: Nonfood

Productively Unproductive

Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly prioritized his work life by classifying tasks as important or not important, and urgent or not urgent.  The resulting two-by-two graph became known as The Eisenhower Matrix and it influenced a lot of thinking in work productivity.  We generally spend far too much on work that is urgent but not important. […]
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  1. Corporate Strategy

Ratings Fatigue

Net Promoter Score (NPS) turns 20 later this year.   What Bain consultant Fred Reichheld first introduced in a HBR article in December 2003 is now ubiquitous. The “how likely are you to recommend” question is asked endlessly after customer experiences, large and small.  The metric that this question generates is now tracked by two-thirds […]
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  1. Data & Insights

Generative AI Adoption

I love the analogy of ChatGPT that Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah shared at the start of the year: “Netscape was to the Internet what ChatGPT is to Artificial Intelligence. “The Internet existed before Netscape. But the browser helped millions of mere mortals connect the dots on what could be done, and dream of what could […]
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  1. Corporate Strategy

Third-Party Cookiepocalypse

Nearly 10 years ago, I drew one of my most popular cartoons that showed a Peeping Tom looking through the window of a living room at a couple. One says, “Don’t worry, it’s only marketers collecting our personal data so they can create more relevant advertising for us.” Third-party cookies have been at the center […]
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  1. Corporate Strategy

The CMO Role

“In some organizations, just the expectations of CMOs are just so out of whack with the reality of what a CMO can really deliver on the timelines, and with the resources and with the headwinds that they have… “I think that in some organizations, you’re just being set up to fail, right?” Gartner analyst Chris […]
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  1. Media & Marketing

Brands on Threads

Meta debuted their own version of Twitter a couple weeks ago called Threads.  The launch created a fire drill for many a marketing team, deciding whether to jump in and if so, in what way. Part of the alarm was caused by the record user growth of the app.  At 100 million users in five […]
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  1. Technology & Innovation

Crossing the Chasm

I’ve drawn a few different cartoons over the years riffing on Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 classic, “Crossing the Chasm.”  I once had the opportunity to give him the original of one of these when we spoke at the same Silicon Valley conference. Given the faddish nature of conventional wisdom in marketing, I particularly appreciate models like […]
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  1. Media & Marketing

5 Stages of Price Promotions

“Price promotions are a drug. They are the crack cocaine of marketing. I hope we’ve seen an end to the senseless promotions that we’ve seen.” Les Binet, group head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, shared these thoughts at last year’s IPA’s Global Effectiveness conference.   Much of the spike in sales that brands see during a […]
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  1. Media & Marketing

Innovation and TikTok

The WSJ had a great feature last week on Chipotle and the “Keithadilla.”  It was a fascinating case study on the state of innovation in the age of TikTok trends. In late 2022, a TikTok influencer named Keith Lee reinterpreted the Chipotle Quesadilla as an off-menu hack that included a DIY sauce combining Chipotle-Honey Vinaigrette […]
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  1. Data & Insights

Impact of ChatGPT

Salesforce recently found that 67% of senior IT leaders are pushing to adopt generative AI across their businesses in the next 18 months, with one-third naming it their top priority.   At the same time, a majority of these senior IT leaders have concerns about what could happen. Among other reservations, the report found that […]
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  1. Technology & Innovation

Virtual Reality

Scott Galloway had an interesting take on Apple’s Vision Pro announcement last week: “It will officially be the most elegant final nail in the coffin of this sort of headset-driven VR consensual hallucination.” If it’s a “headset-driven VR consensual hallucination,” it includes not only the tech players, but all of the brands that jumped on […]
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