Book collection celebrating 15 years of Marketoonist

This Week's Cartoon

Gen Alpha cartoon

Brands Chasing Youth

The marketing industry’s obsession with youth is nothing new.  Thinking about what makes the next generation of consumers tick is a perennial activity. Generic one-size-fits-all advice on how to crack the code on Gen Z (age 16-29) and Gen Alpha (age 0-16) circulates constantly. Sometimes these generations are awkwardly bundled together as “Gen Zalpha.” Much of it trades in lazy… Read More

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Cartoon Powered Marketing

Most Recent Cartoons

Planning for Uncertainty cartoon

Planning for Uncertainty

Almost exactly 6 years ago, as things started to shut down for Covid, I drew a cartoon about the challenges of planning in a time of uncertainty. An executive holds up a coin and says, “We need to update our forecast. Heads, this will blow over soon. Tails, it’s the end of the world.” At the time I shared a… Read More

AI Org Chart cartoon

AI Org Chart

My AI Mad Libs cartoon last week on urgency without clarity in AI strategy was one of my most licensed cartoons from the last 24 years. It got me thinking of the trickle-down effects of muddled strategy through an organization. Whenever there’s ill-defined strategy at the top, there will be poor alignment all the way down. This is particularly true… Read More

AI Strategy cartoon

AI Strategy

We’re in a strange time of urgency without clarity in AI adoption. The pressure is on to adopt everything everywhere all at once. A case in point is agentic AI. Suddenly the term “agentic” is used indiscriminately in everything from strategy decks to marketing copy. Even simple chatbots are being called agents. The pace seems driven by hype and panic… Read More

The Marketing Plan cartoon

The Marketing Plan

A few year ago, Mark Ritson wrote a handy guide to creating a marketing plan and critiqued those who make “PowerPoint decks by the yard.” Mark wrote: “Most marketing plans are PowerPoint presentations. Nothing wrong with that. But they are just too damned long – 50, 100, 200 slides in a plan. This is a shithouse way to present anything…. Read More

Advertising and Celebrities cartoon

Advertising, Brand Recall, and Celebrities

Super Bowl ads have always juggled story power and star power. But the overall swing toward celebrities has been an ongoing trend. In 2010, just 31% of Super Bowl ads included a famous face. Last year, a whopping 68% of Super Bowl ads featured celebrities and 51% featured multiple celebrities, according to iSpot.tv and EMARKETER. (I haven’t seen the final… Read More

5 Stages of AI Adoption cartoon

5 Stages of AI Adoption

Steve Jobs famously described the computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Last week, my old friend Jason Copeland invited me to join a Silicon Valley roundtable he moderated with a fascinating topic: “Will AI be a bicycle for the mind? Or an autopilot to which we passively delegate human judgment and creativity? “We’re biologically hardwired to adopt tools that… Read More

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