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Tom Fishburne shared this"The Itty Bitty Sh*tty Committee" - I've always liked this colorful expression to describe the critical, anxious inner monologue that can drive our thinking. For anyone doing creative work, the committee is a barrier. It can stymie whatever creative ideas we're working on. It's hard to fully mute the committee, but we can create environments that help turn the volume down. Steve Martin once said, "the conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer." In my experience, the self-editor naturally dominates, which can limit or curtail the most interesting and creative ideas. There's a time and place for the editor, but it can cause damage if it shows up too early. Being deliberate about when we're in "creator" mode and when we're in "critic" mode can help. I have different parts of my studio for these two types of work to help set those boundaries. A creative chair for idea generation and a desk for editing. The committee is an individual challenge, but it's also a collective one. If we're leading any sort of innovation team, we want an environment that encourages the most creative ideas to surface. Walt Disney famously thought of three distinct mindsets in idea creation: the Dreamer, the Realist, and the Spoiler. The Dreamer specializes in blue sky thinking without constraints, the Realist mentality puts practical structure to the ideas, and the Spoiler asks the hard questions and kicks the tires. We need all three mindsets. But we need those mindsets at the right time and in the right way. As Disney alum Paul Williams at Idea Sandbox put it: “When we brainstorm alone and in groups – too often – we tend to fill the room with a Dreamer or two, a few Realists, and a bunch of Spoilers. In these conditions dream ideas don’t stand a chance.” >>> Subscribe to get a new hand-drawn cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoonist
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Tom Fishburne shared this"The AI Strategy" - I drew this cartoon thinking about how much panic and FOMO has been setting the pace and tenor of AI adoption. No one wants to be left behind. And that's led to some of the most disjointed decisions we've seen, like banking on business growth by laying off staff and assuming AI will "automagically" fill the gap. CNBC reported that 32% of hiring managers have eliminated roles primarily due to AI, only to later rehire for the exact same roles (losing the institutional memory along the way). BCG released their most recent AI at Work study and it includes this takeaway that could be painted on every C-suite wall: "Strategic clarity beats tools." BCG found that employees with "strong strategic clarity and limited access to tools" outperformed (by 20 percentage points) those with "limited strategic clarity and strong access to tools." Northeastern professor David De Cremer wrote a piece in the HBR recently on the risks of the "urgency bias" in setting AI strategy. I like this observation: "It will be patience rather than speed that will turn AI adoption into new and holistic value creation. When speed is prioritized above all else, organizations cut corners. They underinvest in change management, neglect skill development, and treat AI as a plug-and-play solution." Not having an AI strategy is still a form of AI strategy. >>> Subscribe to get a new hand-drawn cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne shared this"The AI Scarlet Letter" - This cartoon was partly inspired by the whiplash approach to AI writing at LinkedIn. A few years ago, they indiscriminately pushed AI tools, offering to draft a full post after typing just 30 words. Surprise, surprise, this resulted in a lot of AI slop on the platform. A recent study from Pangram Labs claims that 41% of long-form posts on LinkedIn were entirely AI-generated, the highest share of any social network. Last week, Patrick Coffee in the WSJ chronicled LinkedIn's attempts to course-correct, including retiring their "enhance your post" tool and adding a "seems like AI slop" reporting button. We've swung from seeing "write with AI" pushed in just about every empty text field to "AI" becoming a new scarlet letter in writing. In related news, Anthropic announced that Claude would start watermarking AI text in response to new EU regulation, whether the writing was written whole-cloth or even just proofed by AI. As Shelly Palmer Palmer observed: "We might as well just call this 'False Positives for Everyone.'" This coincides with a wider witch hunt to root out AI in writing, including calling out writers for errant em-dashes and other "AI tells." In turn, writers have responded by deliberately inserting typos and using AI tools marketed to help other AI tools sound more human. Or as I wrote in a cartoon last year: "People respond to content that is "AUTHENTIC," "GENUINE," and "HUMAN." So let's include those words in our AI prompts." >>> Subscribe to get a new hand-drawn cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne shared this"Product Design and Conway's Law" - 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 1967, a computer scientist named Melvin Conway introduced an idea that explains this phenomenon and system design in general. It eventually became known as Conway's Law. In a piece titled "How Do Committees Invent?", Conway observed that systems end up shaped like the organizations that designed them. As Conway put it: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." In other words, whatever we make -- products, customer experiences, system architectures -- mirrors our own org charts. Conway's point wasn't only about hierarchy. It was about how these different groups communicate. Every gap in communication becomes a gap in the product. Our org structure is a design input, whether we treat it as one or not. The dysfunctions of silo thinking show up directly in the products and services we make. And we're often too close to notice. When we do step back and look at our product experience the way customers do, the gaps we find tend to mirror the gaps in our own organizations. Customers don't care about the org chart. But they feel it when it shapes the product. >>> Subscribe to get a new hand-drawn cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne shared this"AI Overviews Changing the Game" - 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: make useful content and receive traffic in return. AI Overviews have changed the game, and not just because of "zero-click search." The SEO analytics firm Ahrefs recently reported that only 38% of the citations in AI Overviews match what shows up in the top 10 search results. In July 2025, that number was 76%. That's a 50% drop in just eight months. They also found that 31% of citations come from pages that don't rank in the top 100 at all. There's no shortage of authorities claiming to know the new rules of the game. But everything is still in flux. What works today may not work tomorrow. What works for the Google ecosystem may not work for ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI engines. All we know for sure is that climbing the same old ladder won't yield the same results. >>> Subscribe to get a new marketing cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne shared this"Optimizing for the Wrong Metrics" - 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 improve in the first place. Chasing metrics can bring unintended consequences or steer businesses in the wrong direction altogether. Goodhart's Law dates back 50 years, but it's particularly timely in a world of AI. An optimization algorithm is only as good as the metrics it is designed to optimize. The routes AI finds can be technically correct, yet damaging in the long run. Customer service is a case in point. Agents and chatbots promise efficiency and quicker resolution, measured by classic service metrics like average handle time. Yet, those metrics can lead AI to give fabricated or hallucinated information or make it harder to escalate. That could negatively impact brand trust in the long run, which may not be measured at all in the moment. As DataNumen CEO Chongwei Chen put it in a recent Entrepreneur article: "A 20% decrease in customer response time and drop in escalations are meaningless if wrong answers are given or handoffs to human agents are systemically made difficult." The more we drive our businesses with metrics and dashboards, the more we need to question what those metrics and dashboards measure. We can measure the response time and forget the value of the response. >>> Subscribe to get a new marketing cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne shared this"The Trust Gap in Marketing Qualified Leads" - 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 "Marketing Qualified Lead" or MQL. Forrester later acquired SiriusDecisions and helped turn MQLs into a widespread industry metric. But any metric tied to incentives eventually gets gamed. Just how "Qualified" these "Marketing Qualified Leads" are has become an ongoing challenge, ever getting harder with the rise of bot traffic. Part of the problem starts even earlier than qualification. A few years ago, the LinkedIn B2B Institute analyzed the targeting overlap between sales and marketing across 7,046 B2B organizations and found the average alignment was just 16%. Sales and marketing aren't even reaching the same buyers. Small wonder that the handoff from marketing to sales so often misses the mark. As Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg (now at Evidenza, then at the B2B Institute) put it: "The primary reason that marketing and sales are so misaligned is because at most B2B companies both departments pursue a hyper-targeting strategy. The small coverage of the sales and marketing circles dramatically decreases the likelihood of overlap." We've come a long way from Glengarry Glen Ross with new tools, new acronyms, and a CRM instead of index cards. But sales still doesn't trust what marketing hands over. >>> Subscribe to get a new marketing cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne shared thisThrowback cartoon I drew in 2012, in the same vein as Monday's new cartoon on “Top of Mind” brands. >>> Subscribe to get a new cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon #throwback
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Tom Fishburne shared this"Top of Mind" - 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 seeing Saatchi & Saatchi's then CEO Kevin Roberts give a talk at General Mills (where I worked at the time). Kevin was promoting his newly published book, Lovemarks, about the opportunity for brands to cultivate "loyalty beyond reason." It made me laugh to think about consumers "in love" with brands, when most consumers don't think about brands as much as marketers think they do. Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute challenged the myths of brand loyalty and "brand love" in particular. He found that consumers tend to be loyal to a repertoire of brands and “loyalty is often more a function of habit, familiarity and lack of caring rather than unbound devotion.” Or as Andrew Ehrenberg famously put it: "Your customers are the customers of other brands who occasionally buy you." Rather than push for "loyalty beyond reason," they urged marketers to focus on what was classically known as "brand salience" -- the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in buying situations. Ehrenbeg-Bass codified and expanded brand salience as "mental availability" as they brought actually scientific inquiry to marketing as a science. "Mental availability" may not be as romantic as brand love, but it's the difference between being top of mind and being left on the bench. >>> Subscribe to get a new marketing cartoon and my insights every Monday (24 years and counting): https://lnkd.in/gbugugVn #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Tom Fishburne reacted on thisTom Fishburne reacted on thisMOPZA26 is opening with a keynote about something Marketing Ops could probably use more of: humor. We’re excited to welcome Tom Fishburne, creator of Marketoonist, to the MOPZA26 stage for The Funny Side of Marketing Ops. For more than 20 years, Tom has been turning the realities and absurdities of marketing and business into cartoons read by half a million people each week. Now he’s putting MOPZA26 attendees to work. Take a look at the cartoon shown on this form:https://tally.so/r/gD8aPJ and submit your best caption. Funny? Clever? Painfully accurate? We want to see it. Submit your caption by Friday, September 25 at 5pm. Tom will share some of his favorites during his opening keynote. 👉 Enter the MOPZA26 Cartoon Caption Contest: https://tally.so/r/gD8aPJ Then join us at MOPZA26 to see which captions make the keynote.
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Tom Fishburne reacted on thisAny advice on tightening the AI Assistant door padlock? These annoying, unwelcome visitors are downright rude. The developers forgot to tell them that do not belong in every meeting and workflow. Yet they keep banging on the front door of creativity. I am open to suggestions on how to turn off those pesky and intrusive AI pop ups. Give me the choice of when I want them to welcome them through the front door. I do NOT want a Copilot or Gemini co-author peeking at every single activity--especially my original writing! When I get frustrated by these so-called "product features," I turn to humor. And I found it. Thank you Tom Fishburne . You captured the workplace zeitgeist.Tom Fishburne reacted on thisHahaha, maybe one of Tom Fishburne's best ever! 🤣 AI writing is now able to annoy you endlessly when you *don't* want to use it, and shame you mercilessly when you do. Didn't any of these AI engines ingest Dale Carnegie books? This is not how you win friends and influence people. Speaking of indigestion... I'm with Ann Handley on the whole em dash thing. I've been stylistically writing with em dashes for decades — they're my favorite piece of punctuation. (See!) The damn AI models trained on *my* writing, agreed that em dashes make for pretty snappy prose, and swallowed the pattern into their voracious maws. (You're welcome, you thankless beasts.) But you'll have to pry the em dash from my cold, dead hands. 😂 I know, I know, Anthropic's watermarking algorithm is more sophisticated than that. (That's fodder for a much longer and more serious debate.) But for us human AI detectors — and we are getting pretty good at spotting AI-generated writing, aren't we? — if you see em dashes in *my* writing, you can be guaranteed that I put them there. Intentionally. Proudly. Defiantly.
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Joseph Tarnowski
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Paula Limena
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Steven Ekstract
🔥 One of the most exciting frontiers in brand licensing? Food & beverage mashups — where two powerhouses combine to create something entirely new, and consumers are absolutely here for it. Take, for instance, the Oreo × Reese’s mashup: a perfect example of how blending beloved flavor profiles can lead to major buzz and big business. (I saw this covered in Food Business News recently.) Here’s what makes these mashups a force to reckon with: Why Food & Beverage Mashups Are Driving Growth 1. Instant Brand Equity Transfer When two trusted names come together, consumers don’t just get a new product — they get instant trust. Both brands’ reputations inject credibility and excitement from day one. 2. Novelty + Familiarity = Powerful Combo People love something new, as long as it feels comfortable. Combining familiar flavors or products in unexpected ways hits that sweet spot. 3. Amplified Marketing & Media Buzz Two brands mean double the reach. Mashups spark virality, social media chatter, collaborations, co-marketing possibilities, and earned media. 4. Cross-Category Innovation These collaborations push the boundaries: snack meets candy, dessert meets beverage, etc. They open up entirely new categories or subcategories. 5. Premium Pricing & Limited Releases Because these mashups are often seen as special, they can command premium pricing, limited edition exclusivity—which creates urgency. Brand Licensing Implications For licensors: mashups are a chance to expand your footprint into adjacent categories without building a new product from scratch. For licensees: aligning with a trusted brand reduces risk, increases consumer trust, and accelerates market acceptance. Partnerships must align on quality, supply chain, branding, and shared values — if not, the mashup can miss the mark. I’d love to hear what you think: 🧐 What are some of your favorite food/beverage mashups done right? https://lnkd.in/eda66Xtu
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