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This Week's Cartoon

Behind the Focus Group Glass cartoon

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 to support a predetermined decision. … Read More

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Most Recent Cartoons

Writing and SEO Word Soup cartoon

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. The result is a pool… Read More

Marketing Leads Handoff to Sales cartoon

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, we have much better tools… Read More

Future of Search cartoon

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 through a list of results…. Read More

Super Bowl Ad Playbook cartoon

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 a 2021 survey (but couldn’t… Read More

AI Washing cartoon

AI Washing

“AI suffers from an unrelenting, incurable case of vagueness,” Eric Siegel told BBC reporter James Clayton. At the same time, Gartner pegged Generative AI in its most recent Hype Cycle as being on the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” That combined “vagueness” and “hype” is a recipe for “AI-powered” being applied indiscriminately across just about anything.  Wired described CES 2024 a… Read More

Staying Focused cartoon

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 want to create space for… Read More

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