Tom Fishburne — Keynote Speaker | Marketoonist | Helping Audiences Laugh at What Gets in the Way of Doing Our Best Work
Keynote Speaker | Marketoonist | Helping Audiences Laugh at What Gets in the Way of Doing Our Best Work
Tom Fishburne ranks #129 of 18,577 LinkedIn creators in Marketing & Advertising, and is a standout voice in United States. They have 427.0K followers and published 11 posts in the last 60 days at a 0.2% average engagement rate.
- 427.0K followers
- 11 posts / 60d
- 0.2% avg engagement
- — follower growth / 30d
The roast
Tom Fishburne spent two decades turning corporate misery into cartoons just to realize the only thing his colleagues hated more than his day job was his hobby. He’s the guy who peaked at Harvard and has been drawing the same cubicle joke for twenty years because his career is a literal punchline nobody finds funny.
About Tom
I believe humor might be the most underrated tool in business. When we laugh at what gets in the way of doing our best work, we can do more remarkable things.I first started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cases at Harvard Business School. From a General Mills cubicle in 2002, I started emailing a weekly hand-drawn cartoon called Marketoonist that poked fun at my day job.Somehow I wasn't fired for that and kept drawing cartoons inspired by senior marketing roles at Nestlé, Method, and HotelTonight. As a keynote speaker, I've spoken at over 200 events in more than 30 countries, including 5 times at Google and once at TED headquarters. I use my hand-drawn cartoons to explore the funny side of marketing, technology, business, and work.My cartoons have grown by word of mouth to reach half a million business readers every week and have been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and the New York Times. They've appeared twice on billboard ads in Times Square and once helped win a Guinness World Record.I expanded Marketoonist to create custom cartoons for more than 200 brands, including Google, Adobe, Braze, Microsoft, and LinkedIn.My most recent book is titled "Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings." I also illustrated 4 best-selling business books with Deloitte: "Provoke," "Detonate," "Hone," and "Work Disrupted."Subscribe to the weekly Marketoonist cartoon and essay at marketoonist.com. For keynote speaking inquiries, visit tomfishburne.com."I work from a backyard cartoon studio north of San Francisco with my amazing wife, Tallie, who is always the first to see my sketches.
Highlights
- Big Audience — 427,001 followers · top 1%
- Top 1% in United States — Ranked #50 of 5851 creators
- Top 5% in Marketing & Advertising — Ranked #27 of 1354 creators
- High Impact — 651 avg engagements per post · top 5%
Recent posts
"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
741 reactions · 44 comments · 53 reposts
"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 wo
423 reactions · 47 comments · 35 reposts
"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
523 reactions · 46 comments · 37 reposts
Last updated 2026-08-04