Marketoonist is the thought bubble of Tom Fishburne. Marketing cartoons, content marketing with a sense of humor, keynote speaking.
I heard somewhere years ago that the reason the classic TV remote control is so ridiculously complicated is that each button has its own product manager, lobbying hard for the features of that button. I think of that every time I stay in an Airbnb and can t figure out how to turn on the TV. It inspired this cartoon. In The post Product Design and Conway’s Law first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom…
There’s an old joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results. For years, the name of the game was to rank as highly as possible in the top 10 blue links. Some of the game resulted in mindless keyword stuffing and other SEO hacks. But it also created a value exchange: The post AI Overviews Changing the Game first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne .
I recently stumbled across Goodhart s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The British economist Charles Goodhart originally framed this in a 1975 article on monetary policy, but it s an important watch-out for business today. When we optimize for a number instead of our true goal, we risk whatever we were trying to The post Optimizing for the Wrong Metrics first…
The quality of marketing leads is an age-old sales gripe. David Mamet famously captured this sentiment in the 1984 play (and 1992 movie) Glengarry Glen Ross. The leads were so bad, they became a running joke among the sales team. In 2002, B2B research firm SiriusDecisions gave the problem a framework, the Demand Waterfall, and its now ubiquitous byproduct, the The post The Trust Gap in Marketing…
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 cartoon was partly inspired by The post Top of Mind first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne .
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 photos. Later this…
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 describes SONK: You take trivial The post New…
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 that a brand tries to The post Brand Origin Stories…
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 innovations set the stage for The post…
A couple years ago, I went to the Cannes Lions, the main show for advertising. There s a giant gallery room in the basement of the main Palais building with all the work submitted for awards. As I walked past the ads and case studies, all I could think about was how the sausage gets made. The creative idea usually gets The post Client-Agency Creative first appeared on Marketoonist | Tom Fishburne…