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

Market Research

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 […]
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  1. Media & Marketing

The Large Print Giveth

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 […]
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  1. Technology & Innovation

Potential of AI

“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 […]
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  1. CPG: Food

Behind the Focus Group Glass

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Data & Insights

Writing and SEO Word Soup

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. […]
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  1. Department: Nonfood

Marketing Handoff to Sales

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, […]
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  1. Department: Food

Future of Search

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 […]
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  1. Corporate Strategy

Super Bowl Ad Playbook

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 […]
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  1. Department: Nonfood

Staying Focused

“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 […]
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  1. Media & Marketing

Navigating Innovation

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 […]
3 min read
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  1. Operations & Supply Chain

Happy (Product) Returns

“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 […]
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  1. CPG: HBC

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like AI-Generated Content

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 […]
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