Tom Fishburne is the founder of Marketoonist, a marketing agency focused on the unique medium of cartoons. Since 2010, they’ve developed marketing campaigns for businesses such as Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Dell, and Kronos. Sitting at the intersection of entertainment and hard-hitting marketing insight, Tom delivers branded content for some of the world’s biggest players and creates campaigns and animations that often go viral. In speeches, he uses cartoons and case studies to tell visual stories about marketing and innovation, blending humor and insight to deliver important takeaways and new ways of thinking about marketing and business to engaged audiences worldwide. He also offers visual storytelling workshops and creates custom event cartoons and prints. Receiving rave reviews, his presentations have been called “captivating” and “inspiring,” and The Huffington Post ranked his SXSW talk the third best of the entire conference (out of 500 presentations).

Tom always had dreams of pursuing his ideas and art—as a kid, he wanted to become a cartoonist. He gave up that dream as an adult and pursued a career marketing, ultimately ending up at Harvard Business School. It was there, as a student, that Tom started drawing cartoons again—this time, on the back of business school case studies. A hobby and idea blossomed into career and, from an emailed cartoon to coworkers in 2002 to an audience of several hundred thousand, Tom’s Marketoonist series has grown by word of mouth to reach influential marketers every week nationwide. His incredible storytelling work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and the New York Times, and his cartoons have appeared on a billboard ad in Times Square, helped win a Guinness World Record, and turned up in a top-secret NSA presentation released by Edward Snowden.

Tom draws (literally and figuratively) from 20 years in the marketing trenches in the US and Europe. Before founding Marketoonist, he was Marketing Vice President at Method Products, Interim Chief Marketing Officer at HotelTonight, and worked in brand management for Nestle and General Mills. Tom developed web sites for interactive agency iXL and started his marketing career selling advertising for the first English-language magazine in Prague.

Tom is also the author of the book, Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings. He lives and draws near San Francisco with his wife and two daughters. 

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