Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

The Marketing Plan

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

A few year ago, Mark Ritson wrote a handy guide about marketing planning 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. It is symptomatic of global marketing teams with no practical experience of brand planning, who are just building PowerPoint decks by the yard. And it is indicative of marketing managers who have not thought long or choicefully enough about their plan."

Mark instead advised a simple "three-part structure of diagnosis feeding strategy, which drives tactical choices."

It's easier than ever to generated PowerPoint decks by the yard. In one of the Super Bowl ads a couple weeks ago, Matthew Broderick used AI to say "finish this slide deck" and it was done.

And yet, work productivity isn't only a measure of the volume of outputs. And when LLMs are trained on PowerPoint decks "by the yard," the path of least resistance is just to generate more of the same.

Recently Kate Niederhoffer, Alexi Robichaux and Jeffrey T. Hancock have been cautioning businesses on the negative effects of what they call "workslop" in a series of HBR articles.

"As AI tools have proliferated in workplaces and pressure to use them has mounted, employees have had to contend with the scourge of workslop, or low-effort, AI-generated work that looks plausibly polished, but ends up wasting time and effort as it offloads cognitive work onto the recipient. For the person on the receiving end, it can be a confusing and infuriating experience."

Ian Whitworth once described AI-generated content as "infinite words nobody wants."

In making our Marketing Plans or any other type of work presentation, we have to be careful we're not creating "infinite slides nobody wants."

Keynotes

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit for some cartoon levity and insight.

For an idea of my approach to keynotes, here’s a full 30-minute keynote from one of my favorite events last year — Opticon 2025 hosted by Optimizely:

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s one of my favorites cartoons I drew in 2016. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

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.