Chat with Tom Fishburne

Marketoonist and Author

About Tom Fishburne

In 2006, Tom Fishburne launched Marketoonist, not as a side project, but as a deliberate act of marketing dissent: he began drawing cartoons on napkins during agency pitches to expose the absurdity of jargon-laden strategies and misaligned KPIs. His first viral cartoon, 'The Marketing Funnel (As Actually Experienced)', replaced smooth conversion stages with chaotic customer realities, abandoned carts, confusing CTAs, and support tickets buried in Slack threads. Unlike illustrators who decorate presentations, Fishburne’s work functions as diagnostic tools: his 'Customer Journey Map' cartoon revealed how departments treat handoffs like relay races with dropped batons, prompting real process redesigns at Fortune 500 companies. He doesn’t simplify marketing, he makes its contradictions visible, using visual metaphors grounded in actual campaign post-mortems, martech stack audits, and sales enablement failures. His books aren’t collections of jokes; they’re field manuals built from 17 years of observing how teams actually make decisions when budgets are tight and deadlines loom.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Tom Fishburne:

  • “What’s the most common marketing myth your cartoons debunk?”
  • “How do you decide which client meeting gets turned into a cartoon?”
  • “Which of your cartoons has led to an actual process change at a company?”
  • “What’s the biggest shift in marketing visuals since you started Marketoonist?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Fishburne avoid using stock art or clipart in his cartoons?
He rejects generic visuals because they obscure real marketing problems. Stock art implies consensus where none exists, like showing a smiling team around a whiteboard labeled 'Innovation.' Fishburne’s characters have specific, identifiable flaws: a CMO clutching a broken attribution model, a product marketer holding a roadmap full of unvalidated assumptions. His style evolved from sketching live during workshops to force honesty about what teams *actually* see, not what they wish they saw.
Has Fishburne ever refused to draw a cartoon for a client?
Yes, most notably for a SaaS company that demanded he illustrate their 'frictionless onboarding' claim while their own NPS data showed 68% of users abandoned setup after step three. Fishburne declined, explaining that drawing fiction would undermine his credibility and harm the client’s internal learning. Instead, he co-created a cartoon titled 'Onboarding Theater' with their UX team, using real session recordings as reference, later featured in their internal culture deck.
How does Fishburne source ideas without violating client confidentiality?
He anonymizes rigorously: swapping industry-specific tech for visual proxies (e.g. replacing a fintech dashboard with a Rube Goldberg machine), changing color palettes to break associations, and combining fragments from three or more engagements. His archive includes over 1,200 cartoons, yet zero have triggered a confidentiality dispute, because he treats each drawing as a synthesis, not a transcript.
What role did Fishburne’s time at Campbell Soup play in shaping Marketoonist?
His seven years leading global brand strategy taught him how layered organizational inertia really is, especially when trying to modernize legacy channels. A 2011 cartoon mocking 'TV-first digital strategies' was born from internal debates about shifting $200M+ media budgets. That experience made him skeptical of top-down transformation talk, fueling his focus on middle-management friction points rather than executive vision statements.
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Topics

humorcartoonsmarketing

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