Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.

One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.” A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used ChatGPT

There’s nothing spookier this Halloween than some of the headlines. Sapio Research recently found that 95% of global businesses are concerned about a recession.

Brands are judged less by how they operate when things go right, than by how they handle situations when things go wrong.

This cartoon is a follow-up to a cartoon I drew just four years ago about a kid on Santa’s lap in a different privacy era: “Well, Timmy, if you didn’t want me to see you when you’re sleeping, know when you’re awake, know if you’ve been bad or good, and sell that data to third

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.

I was struck by this observation from Ron Carucci in his HBR article last month on returning to the office: “If the transition to WFH wasn’t challenging enough, the transition back to the office may prove even more difficult.”

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.

My cartoon last week, “AI Written, AI Read”, has already become one of my more widely shared cartoons ever — nearly a million impressions on LinkedIn alone. Generative AI is clearly on a lot of our minds right now. Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, voiced the level of hype related to Generative AI at a

Doing “more with less” is emerging as a sort of business mantra for 2023. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the term externally and internally this week to talk about the overall business climate. In a memo to staff announcing layoffs, he looked outward: “As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic,

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.

When I worked on the method brand from 2006-2010, we often talked about about trying to stand out in a “sea of sameness.” Like many aisles in the grocery story, household cleaning was dominated by brands that looked and sounded alike — same stock bottle packaging, same messaging, same product benefits, same designs, same claims. There was very little differentiation or distinctiveness.

In last week’s cartoon, I parodied some of my favorite clichés in marketing presentation slides. With just six panels in that cartoon, I had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. One of my other favorite used and abused slides is the ever-present framework, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow first

There has never been a greater level of marketing clutter. Yankelovich Consumer Research charts that "we've gone from being exposed to about 500 marketing messages a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today." At the same time, marketing communication is often little more than a string of adjectives: bigger, better, faster, cheaper, etc.

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

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

“The plural of anecdote is not data,” the old aphorism goes. I think the inverse is also interesting: “The singular of data is not anecdote.” Marcus Collins, Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York, made the following observation a couple years ago: “Though the amount of data available to marketers has increased exponentially over time,

“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

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.