Before this week's cartoon, I wanted to share that our custom cartoon collaboration last year with Atlassian was just named part of a Shorty Award finalist for Best Brand Awareness Campaign. Reply to this newsletter if you'd ever like to explore custom cartoons.

Storytelling and AI

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LinkedIn reported that the percentage of US job postings that include the term "storyteller" doubled last year from the year before.

Katie Deighton recently wrote about this in the WSJ:

"Marketing and technology companies have often repurposed grandiose descriptions from other arenas to lend corporate office roles additional sparkle. While the heyday of technology gurus, developer ninjas, SEO rockstars and at least one digital prophet have long since passed, calling salaried communications professionals “storytellers” and the practice of storytelling appears to only have picked up in popularity."

Of course this isn't totally new. Storytelling in business practice goes through periods of being in vogue.

In 2014, Austrian designer Stefan Sagmeister famously pilloried the whole idea of creatives calling themselves storytellers, showing up to a conference on storytelling to tell everyone they weren't really storytellers.

"People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films don’t see themselves as storytellers. It’s all the people who are not storytellers, who kind of for strange reasons because it’s in the air suddenly now want to be storytellers."

I find it funny that Stefan Sagmeister's own wikipedia now describes him as a "graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer."

AI is impacting storytelling in interesting ways. In some ways, AI is democratizing storytelling. It's helping amplify and extend stories that might not otherwise get told. Yet, the path of least resistance is to use these tools to generate more of the same.

Custom Cartoon Collaborations

Each year, I collaborate with a few interesting brands to create and amplify hand-drawn custom cartoons for marketing. I've worked with more than 200 brands since 2007.

One of these collaborations (with Atlassian Confluence & Noble People) was just announced as part of a Shorty Award finalist for Best Brand Awareness Campaign. The Shorty Awards are an international competition that celebrates the best of digital and social.

The cartoon part of the campaign drove over 1.3 million impressions and helped generated a 17-point brand lift on LinkedIn (8X the norm).

Reply to this newsletter if you'd ever like to collaborate.

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2016. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.