Tom Fishburne

Marketoonist

Marketoonist is a cartoon studio focused on marketing campaigns and internal culture change using the power of humor. We create marketoon campaigns designed to be content worth sharing.  We've created over 200 content marketing campaigns for large organizations such as Google, SAP, and LinkedIn, and start-up organizations such as Flow, View, and Smartling.  

We've also created internal culture change projects with large organizations such as DBS Bank, Innosight, PwC, and Unilever.

More at http://marketoonist.com

Founder & CEO

HotelTonight

While consulting periodically with HotelTonight from its start in 2010 until its acquisition by AirBnB in 2019, I took an operating role as CMO during a critical period of the company's growth.

While helping recruit full-time CMO candidates, I directly led the marketing team, including brand marketing, direct response, PR, editorial, and social media, including one of Instagram’s first-ever paid media campaigns.  Oversaw company’s first deep-dive consumer research and creation of Brand DNA that harmonized marketing work across the company.

Chief Marketing Officer

method products pbc

Launched method brand into Europe in 16 trial stores at Waitrose while still based in San Francisco head office. Moved to London to open UK office and extended distribution to over 3,000 stores in under two years on a shoestring budget. Method named "UK Household Launch of the Year" by The Grocer.  Extended international launches to Ireland and France.  Promoted to lead overall international business, including Canada, Australia, and Korea.  Led a 10-person team across marketing, sales, operations, and finance.

Managing Director for International

Led cleaning category for method during a period of significant growth.  Launched new products, including omop, featured by Fast Company naming method the 16th most innovative company.

Marketing Director | Home Care

Nestlé

Brand management, new product development, and consumer marketing for Haagen-Dazs.

Brand Manager | Haagen-Dazs

General Mills

Brand management, new product development, and consumer marketing for Yoplait, Green Giant, and Cheerios.

Associate Marketing Manager

iXL (later acquired by Razorfish)

Led digital marketing campaigns and large-scale web development for Fortune 1000 clients including Disney, Mayo Clinic, Virgin Atlantic, Starwood, OAG, and Midwest Express Airlines.

Account Director | Project Manager

Velvet (Prague city magazine)

Sold advertising space, wrote articles, and designed ads for the first English-language magazine in Eastern Europe.

Advertising Director

I started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cases as a student at Harvard Business School in 2000. My cartoons have grown by word of mouth to reach half a million business readers every week and have been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and the New York Times.

In 2010, I started Marketoonist, a creative agency focused on the unique medium of cartoons.  We create content marketing, thought leadership, and culture change campaigns with a sense of humor.  We've worked with more than 200 businesses, including Google, Adobe, Braze, Microsoft, and LinkedIn.

My most recent book is titled "Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings."  I also illustrated 3 business books with Deloitte: "Provoke" (Wall Street Journal Bestseller), "Detonate" (National Bestseller), and "Work Disrupted."

I’m a frequent international keynote speaker on marketing, innovation, and digital transformation, using cartoons to help tell the story. An underlying theme is the role of humor as a leadership skill.  I spoke at the TED headquarters in New York on "The Power of Laughing at Ourselves at Work."

I draw (literally and figuratively) from 20 years in the marketing trenches in the US and Europe. I was interim CMO at HotelTonight, Marketing VP at Method Products, and marketed a variety of brands at Nestle and General Mills. While at iXL, one of the first digital agencies, I helped build web sites for Disney, Starwood, and Mayo Clinic. I started my marketing career selling advertising for the first English-language magazine in Eastern Europe.

I live and draw near San Francisco with my family.

Marketoonist is a cartoon studio focused on marketing campaigns and internal culture change using the power of humor. We create marketoon campaigns designed to be content worth sharing.  We've created over 150 content marketing campaigns for large organizations such as Google, SAP, and LinkedIn, and start-up organizations such as Flow, View, and Smartling.  

We've also created internal culture change projects with large organizations such as DBS Bank, Innosight, PwC, and Unilever.

More at http://marketoonist.com

“Marketing Attribution” — throwback cartoon I drew in 2017, in the same vein as my latest post on “last click attribution”.

>>>

To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gG4GkZsj

If you missed my “last click attribution” cartoon: https://lnkd.in/gFu-d_J9

And you can see all of my cartoon from the last 23 years here: https://lnkd.in/g2QihWRx

#marketing #cartoon #marketoon #throwback

Marketoonist Creator | Keynote Speaker with Humor and Insight

“B2C, B2B, and Business-to-Human” - new cartoon and post:

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 is often mocked as Boring-to-Boring. Partly because of the longer buying process with more stakeholders, B2B marketing traditionally gets mired in features and benefits, missing the actual people involved in the buying process.

I like how Bruno Bertini, CMO at 8x8, put this disconnect recently:

“The CIO scrolling LinkedIn at lunch is the same person scrolling Instagram at night. If they expect connection, creativity and authenticity as consumers, why would they settle for less at work?”

Along these lines, more marketers have started to play with a Business-to-Human framing.

I was struck by this perspective from Rich Atkinson-Toal, VP of Brand at American Express Global Business Travel:

“You have to consider them as people, because [it’s people who] buy things. But if you go straight to the human element and you don’t think about the core of what they do as a job, then you’ll miss the mark and how they actually make decisions…

“It has to be about stopping people in their tracks, making them smile, making them laugh. Just because you’re selling a B2B service doesn’t mean it has to be boring.”

>>>>>

To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter (23 years running), click here: https://lnkd.in/g9DBM6tD

For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gBxJE2ZA

#marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“AI Written, AI Read” — throwback cartoon I drew in 2023, a couple months after the launch of ChatGPT. It’s in the same vein as my post this week on “AI Slop Fatigue and Analog Intelligence.”

>>>

To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gG4GkZsj

If you missed this week’s “AI Slop” cartoon: https://lnkd.in/gecF_fMZ

And you can see all of my cartoon from the last 23 years here: https://lnkd.in/g2QihWRx

#marketing #cartoon #marketoon #throwback

“Designing by Committee” — throwback cartoon I drew in 2017. I’ve drawn a lot of Halloween themed cartoons over the years, but this is my favorite.

>>>

To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gG4GkZsj

You can see all of my cartoon from the last 23 years here: https://lnkd.in/g2QihWRx

#marketing #cartoon #marketoon #throwback

“AI Productivity and Workslop” - new cartoon and post:

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 research in the Harvard Business Review on what they call “The Workslop Tax.”

“We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

“As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. 

“But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”

They found that 40% of US employees have received workslop in the last month. And that 15% of the content these employees receive qualifies as workslop.

One of their conclusions:

“Indiscriminate imperatives yield indiscriminate usage. When organizational leaders advocate for AI everywhere all the time, they model a lack of discernment in how to apply the technology.”

I love how designer Frank Chimero suggests we think of AI less as a tool and more as an instrument:

“Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.

“In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. 

“There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.”

>>>>>

To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter (23 years running), click here: https://lnkd.in/g9DBM6tD

For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gBxJE2ZA

#marketing #cartoon #marketoon

BetterUp

Stanford Social Media Lab

Harvard Business Review

Creative Director

Marco Alexandro Moreno Meraz

“Category Leaders” — fourth cartoon in a collaboration with Jon Evans and Uncensored CMO, inspired by his recent podcast conversation with the legendary David Droga (founder of Droga5 and former CEO of Accenture Song).

In this episode of Uncensored CMO, Jon and David talk about advertising and how a great idea is worth 50X the budget.

I was struck by this observation in the interview:

“People's aspirations are to be average … they want to be of a category, they want to be of a type. You know what I mean? And so they aspire for the middle.

“They worry that if they go too extreme they sort of lose on the edges and then everything blends. You know, why does every car commercial kind of look the same? Why does every pharmaceutical commercial or bank commercial kind of look the same?

“People need to sort of replicate category leaders … but they've been following the wrong pace car all the time.”

Listen on Spotify
https://lnkd.in/gDArzdCW

Listen on Apple
https://lnkd.in/gBF5HfVS

Watch on YouTube
https://lnkd.in/g2rEiYdP

>>>

Last year, Uncensored CMO and System1 hosted me in Cannes for the week as their cartoonist-in-residence (and podcast guest). 

In this new collaboration, I’m drawing cartoons inspired by some of their podcast conversations. 

I’ve been a fan of Uncensored CMO for a while now — Jon hosts some of the most insightful conversations with marketing practitioners on the front lines of marketing. I hope you enjoy the cartoons.

Kerry Collinge Marketoonist

Brand partnership • Marketoonist Creator | Keynote Speaker with Humor and Insight

“Social Media is Not Real Life” — fifth cartoon in a collaboration with Jon Evans and Uncensored CMO, inspired by his recent podcast conversation with Craig Brommers (CMO for American Eagle).

In this episode of Uncensored CMO, Jon and Craig discuss how American Eagle navigated the social media firestorm around their summer campaign. It’s estimated that 1 in 5 comments were generated by bots.

Follow-on testing confirmed a wide chasm between the social media noise and how the vast majority of people felt about the campaign.

I was struck by this observation in the interview:

“As I was going through this experience it almost felt like I was living in alternate universes because on one side we're looking at very encouraging business performance, customer performance, and as I just mentioned, advertising performance. Obviously the stock market had reacted quite positively to the campaign as well. And so, so those are the real time facts…

“But in the other universe you're hearing all the noise in social media…

“I actually turned it off because I needed to isolate noise from fact.”

Listen on Spotify
https://lnkd.in/eTEw4yyk

Listen on Apple
https://lnkd.in/eJPe8sMw

Watch on YouTube
https://lnkd.in/eaEMX3qq

>>>

Last year, Uncensored CMO and System1 hosted me in Cannes for the week as their cartoonist-in-residence (and podcast guest). 

In this new collaboration, I’m drawing cartoons inspired by some of their podcast conversations. 

I’ve been a fan of Uncensored CMO for a while now — Jon hosts some of the most insightful conversations with marketing practitioners on the front lines of marketing. I hope you enjoy the cartoons.

Kerry Collinge Marketoonist

Chief Customer Officer | CMO | Uncensored CMO Podcast host | Speaker | Columnist | PMW Top 20 2025

Uncensored CMO

Chief Marketing Officer at AMERICAN EAGLE OUTFITTERS INC.

Uncensored CMO Podcast MD | Commercial Director a.p.e I MiniMBA | ThePowerMBA/ Co-Author of Pivot and Grow I Board Advisor I Mentor

Two of my favorite collaborators over the last few years have been Deloitte partners Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach.

Geoff and Steve have a captivating and deeply insightful approach to business concepts and questioning how strategy should work. Today they launch “Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift.”

They nicely invited me to illustrate the book with 24 original cartoons and drawings.

This is the third of three books we’ve worked on together (they’ve dubbed it “the capstone to the accidental trilogy”), alongside national and WSJ bestsellers Detonate (2018) and Provoke (2021).

Congrats to Geoff, Steven, and the whole team, including Megan Buskey and Terra Sorensen.

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