Potential of AI
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
3d ago
“We approach the integration of AI with a mixture of excitement and caution,” Kate Seymour, marketing director at CMYK, said recently.  She captured I think how many businesses are thinking about AI. She went on: “While we recognise the vast potential AI holds for enhancing our own marketing strategies and improving the services we offer our clients, we also acknowledge the importance of preserving the human touch.” Other major points of caution range from IP issues to brand reputation to confidential data concerns to employee misuse to hallucinations to simply not knowing what’s inside ..read more
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Behind the Focus Group Glass
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
2w ago
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.  Ad hoc comments can be given too much weight or taken too literally. When I worked at General Mills, our agency partners would sometimes jokingly refer to the focus groups held in a suburb of our Minneapolis he ..read more
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Writing and SEO Word Soup
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
3w ago
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 of lookalike articles, written for search engines, not written for people. The actual writing is often treated as an afterthought. As Jono put it in an interview recently: “You are recursively optimizing a very small corpus till it’s all jus ..read more
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Marketing Handoff to Sales
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
1M ago
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 now to nurture and qualify leads — not just overall fit, but more importantly the context of whether people are actually in the market to buy. In 2021, Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute revealed the 95:5 rule.  He found ..read more
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Future of Search
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
1M ago
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. In the last year, AI has catalyzed a move towards a new verb that will redefine our digital experience: ‘Ask.’” This shift in verbs from “search” to “ask” has major implications (and downstream consequences) for anyone using the Internet.   ..read more
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Super Bowl Ad Playbook
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
1M ago
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 find the survey itself so maybe take it with a grain of salt) that 43% of Super Bowl watchers in the US tune in just to see the ads.  And Nielsen found in 2010 that 51% of viewers enjoyed the commercials more than the game itself. Super Bowl adverti ..read more
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AI Washing
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
2M ago
“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 couple weeks ago as “the year AI ate Vegas.”  Products ranged from AI-powered pillows to vacuum cleaners to toothbrushes.  Anything that uses an algorithm is being rebranded as “AI.”   As Jame ..read more
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Navigating Innovation
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
2M ago
I recently stumbled across this observation on innovation from Ger Perdisatt of Microsoft: “Often, companies talk a good game about innovation, but when these aspirations bump up against the realpolitik of running corporate organizations, there is typically only one winner: the status quo.” The pressure of the status quo is strong.  Champions of innovation have to navigate a complex organizational maze to bring ideas to life.  How we run that gauntlet makes a difference in the condition of the ideas at the end of the process. One challenge in creating a culture of innovation is that ..read more
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Gen Z is not a Monolith
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
2M ago
In the 20+ years I’ve been drawing this cartoon series, one evergreen topic I’ve loved exploring is how brands sometimes twist into pretzels trying to appeal to new generations, often with hilarious unintended effects. Advice often comes in the form of a 5-step checklist — or a “one weird trick” — that magically promises to make brands appealing to the newest customer cohort (whether Millennials, Gen Z or, most recently, Gen Alpha).   Last year, Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, opened up a Gen Z lab and hired a “ZEO” to run it.  One piece of advice from their ZEO quoted recentl ..read more
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Happy (Product) Returns
Marketoonist
by tomfishburne
3M ago
“Free Returns” has become the new “Free Shipping,” which is creating a massive logistical headache for retailers, particularly in the weeks after Christmas.   This year, shoppers in the US returned 14.5% of the items they purchased, valued at $743 billion.  That’s nearly double the return rates of pre-pandemic 2019.  One third of shoppers now make returns part of their shopping strategy, buying multiple items, knowing they’ll return some later. As Gartner retail analyst Tom Enright put it in the WSJ a few days ago, “we’re headed for a trillion dollar problem here.” The economic ..read more
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