Tom Fishburne on marketing & storytelling through cartoons

Mikey: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Presentation Thinking, aka the Storyteller Study Club. This is Maike Meduski, your co host and founder of Ghost Ranch Communications at Presentation Design Agency. And I'm joined by your favorite, my co host, Molly Gagan, straight out of Inglewood, Colorado. How's it going?

Molly: Hey, Maike. From Presentation Nation.

How's it going? I am, uh, very excited to be here today, Maike. One of our TED Talk meet cutes, if you're just tuning in for the first time, Mikey and I love to do a bit of a series where we take a TED Talk, you know, we love presentations, we love speakers, and who does it better than the people on the [00:01:00] TED stage?

So we take a TED Talk, we watch it, we fangirl over it, we kind of break down what they did, like, really well, like, what their word count is, we get really specific. And one that I really, what we really, really loved, because we love visual communication, Was the creator of Marketoonist, Tom Fishburne, and after publishing the episode, he got a handy dandy LinkedIn comment and a DM from Tom, and he's here with us today.

Tom, welcome to Presentation Thinking.

Tom: Thank you so much, it's so great to be here.

Molly: This is really fun, and I've just come off, like literally just yesterday, finished your book, which is called Your Ad Ignored Here, published twenty 2018. Yeah. Exactly. If you are like a doodler in meetings, which I totally am, I'm not an, Mikey's the artist, Mikey's the real artist.

You will relate to, and if you work in any realm of marketing, you will relate to some of the comics that are featured in this book. But, um, Tom, I know, I mean, we know we're familiar with your story from the TED talk. Why don't you give us a little bit of [00:02:00] a, an intro of who you are and how you, how you got here as creative marketunist.

Absolutely.

Tom: Absolutely. So. I'm both a marketer and a cartoonist like the cartooning probably predated everything because I used to love to draw cartoons even when I was a kid and I didn't really share them with anyone. I kind of do as well, you know, with my brothers and with my friends and that kind of thing, you know, and uh, strangely wasn't until business school that I started in actually drawing a regular cartoon strip as a student at business school.

Um, I went to go work in marketing. I did some marketing things before business school, but I, but I really focused on marketing coming out of business school. And when I arrived at my first job out of business school, I looked around me. I thought there are so many funny things happening here that I just have to have to make fun of in a cartoon.

And I thought I would just continue drawing basically what I had done in business school, this cartoon, but rather than have a business school newspaper, I just started putting it online and one thing led to another. And, uh, that weekly marketing cartoon has been running for 22 years now.

Mikey: It's amazing.

And it's Molly, like, I know when we stumbled upon the [00:03:00] Ted talk and I'm sure as many do, it's like, Oh, I've seen this work before. And you know, the thing, these cartoons are hilarious because they're true and like, so spot on often. And so they get circulated, I'm sure through across departments when it's like, Oh gosh, this is classic, you know, so and so Tom, like what, what's the deal?

Why is marketing so funny and just like business culture in general and, you know, how was it first received when you got to a marketing gig and you started to kind of like poke fun at it?

Tom: I think I've learned over time that really every industry has its own humor. What was unique about my experiment, not really unique about my experience, but I was working in such a large company that sometimes if you work in a large organization, sometimes people are a little bit reticent to actually call things out.

To say like the emperor has no clothes. And so that was the moment for me that I was like, Oh my God, these things are happening and we're not really talking about them. I think it's funny and when I would share in groups of one, two, three people, we were all like noticing it, but we weren't saying it. And so [00:04:00] I, that, that led me to start the cartoon initially just for my coworkers.

I thought I'd send it to just a few people I worked with. And then people would started contacting me, asking to be on my list. I didn't really have a list at that point. I was literally sending out an email with people in BCC. And so I had to figure out how to set up like a proper, like email subscription list, and then once I did that, like suddenly people started signing up.

All over the place, like in my company, but other companies, even outside of marketing, and I realized, Oh my gosh, we're all going through the same thing together. There's this like bonding effect that we're all noticing the same things. So it's, uh, it made me feel less alone, but I've learned over time, like if, if I have a mission of sorts, it's to remind people that we all have a collective sense of humor and not to be afraid to bring it to work wherever you work, whatever industry it is, because it has a lot of positive.

Characteristics in terms of building a culture and connecting with others. And so I've learned over time, like their humor is everywhere. You just have to learn to kind of look for it and pay attention and not be and not be afraid to kind of bring your own [00:05:00] sense of humor to work.

Molly: Yeah, we're going to link this in the spice cabinet to show notes.

But your TED Talk was called the power of laughing at ourselves at work. And I think that's something. We can certainly learn from, and you, I think you had the unique time, kind of the right time, right place, where in those early aughts, 2002, 2003, where you started sharing stuff on the internet in that bloggable sharing from a personal experience way, and people Bye.

We're seeing that and we're just being able to access that right for the first some of the first time so I feel like you had a perfect blend of right time right place on the internet and being able to say the quiet part out loud with the people that also might have been laughing at something in the conference room with you.

Tom: And I had no idea at the time like it was really before before blogging was really much of a thing or before social media certainly. And it just people connected to it. And then over time, as the platform started evolving and getting more mature, like I eventually started blogging alongside the cartoons.

Each week I see our cartoon and I also write. A few hundred words kind of expanding on the topic and then social media, of course, became just a great platform to [00:06:00] reach people. But, uh, yeah, it was never my goal to make this my thing. It was kind of just a hobby on the side initially. Yeah,

Mikey: you had the best.

Well, what is it about cartoons that you think lend themselves to be in this space?

Tom: I think part of it is a way of holding up a mirror and the fact that it's participatory. So when you have like a single classic single panel cartoon, there's an image, there's a caption and the reader has to look at it and kind of put the two together and figure out why it's funny. And if you do it in the right way, like.

The, this unlock happens and they're like, Oh, that's funny. It makes me laugh, but it's, but it is participatory. And, and there's a whole principle of less is more. And what that partly allows you to do is like the reader is putting themselves into it. They have all their own experiences to bear. You know, oftentimes I hear from people who like a particular cartoon and they.

interpreted a totally different way than I might have even intended it. It's this participatory thing. And so I think that's, that's part of it. I also think there's a lot of value in the fact of [00:07:00] having something that's literally hand drawn. That's not a photograph that is, uh, in a way it's part of the less is more thing, but it's also part of your own personal expression.

You know, there are a lot of presentations that can kind of look alike. And when you have a bit of your own, Personality in it, you know, whatever communication medium that is, people respond to that too. So my cartooning style over time is almost like my own, my own handwriting. It's just my own signature way of speaking.

And now it feels very, very true to me. But I think there's something about the nature of cartooning that, that, that it's just a back to basics way of, of talking.

Molly: Yeah. It's like that question when people are like, can you distill everything you want to say in a single sentence or two or a tweet? And it's like, your cartoons reflect that with just a really simple.

I don't know, use some watercolor for color and then like that nice micron kind of black line or sketch of it. And I think if Mikey and I, you know, we've talked about this at Ghost Ranch where even for the people At art, the presentation [00:08:00] is designers at Ghost Ranch, it's like the ability to be able to quickly sketch what you're kind of thinking for a slide or a big idea is really useful.

And something happens for your brain, you know, there's science behind this, absorbing a visual and then absorbing text and then the right combination of the two, like you said, being able to unlock something else is really, when I think, amazing. Presentation and visual storytelling happens. What is your perception of visual storytelling and the combo of text plus words?

Tom: Yeah, I find it, I mean, you touched on so many things that I think about whenever I create a cartoon, but now I find that as I started drawing a cartoon, it became sort of, almost like a bit of exercise that helped me in the rest of my professional career. I found that the way I would approach a situation in a cartoon, trying to distill it down to a couple bare elements, that helped me the next time I had to create a PowerPoint deck.

Or just, you know, or write something like the whole less is more, you know, approach, you know, it's the whole, I can't remember who said this quote originally, like I didn't have enough. I had enough time to write you a long letter. I didn't have enough [00:09:00] time to write you a short letter, like the whole, the whole editor, like distilling it down kind of model.

I think it's something that a lot of people can take advantage of. And that for me, I learned over time in cartooning. I've now that I've been doing this for 27 years. I looked back at some of my earlier cartoons and I was, I was just trying to add as many details as I possibly could. The goal I get to now is to try to make it as just absolutely simple as possible.

Chip away everything that else that's not the core idea. And, and, and it's something that's just a work in progress. I'm continually working at that, trying to get better at that.

Mikey: That's awesome. Tom, how about the, the process of a single new cartoon? I can imagine you just like eavesdropping in an office, like writing down, you're like, Oh, that might be funny.

Like, yeah. So, and how much of your work like hits the cutting room floor and you like, you're scrapping this and trying again.

Tom: Yeah, it's, it's a couple of things. Part of it's the, the first part is the act of noticing and just, I found that the, the, by having a weekly deadline where I needed to draw a cartoon, I constantly had my ears open [00:10:00] and my eyes wide and I was just paying attention to what was around me.

And that became a useful exercise too. I would. Just jot things down. I found my, I would always try to have a sketchbook or paper with me where, and I would hear something, I would jot it down in the moment and think, I don't know what this is yet, but there's something here. So that's part of my process is learning to like, look.

And now, particularly now that I have a whole business around this, my output has to be so much higher. Like I have to be a little more structured around my idea collection time, like what could potentially turn into a cartoon. So that's part of it. And then the other part is the cutting room floor part.

I find my own creative process. I have to. Have dedicated time every day where there are no distractions. It's usually the first thing that I do when I get to the office. I get to the office pretty early and I try to dedicate two hours of the morning without anything else going on. No devices, no screens, no meetings, nothing else.

And then I can take all these bits that I've collected and then sift through them to see if it turns into something. And if I find if I, If I go through the [00:11:00] process every day, just like exercise, like a two hour window every day, where I'm just playing with ideas by the end of a session, I generally have a stack of cards that could turn into something.

And then the next day I go back and look at those cards and I distill it further. And then by the end of the week, I have final cartoons, but it's an iterative process where a ton ends up on the cutting room floor. I tend to work in index cards. So I have stacks of these index. And I like it better than sketchbooks because I can Nick to match and take him out of order.

Put binder clips on them and make like a collection of things, but then I can move around a lot. And then I end up like recycling so many of these index cards because I've started a process. I just don't know where it's going to go. And at the end, it turns into a kind of a kind of a regular sketch that I already had turned into something that's

Molly: easier to one

Mikey: frames

Tom: in my office.

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly: Those are awesome. I have, Mikey, have you ever worked on an end of card when creating a presentation for like all the slides? No, but that

Mikey: sounds brilliant. Yeah, that would be perfect. And then, uh, I know a lot of people start with sticky notes.

Tom: I like it because I can add to it over time. I'll do like a loose sketch on it.

And they'll like, Oh, this is something three days [00:12:00] later I might look at it and like, Oh, if I put these two together, that's something. That's where if I draw all over it, that's something. And it just lets me, I wanted to like eliminate the friction. Yeah. Of the ideas kind of going in, in, in cycles in my head and something that I can actually look at and save for later.

Mikey: Mm hmm. Do you ever share with family members, friends, be like, Hey, is this funny? Or do you just make the judgment call?

Tom: A hundred percent. My, my wife is my ultimate editor on everything. And, and my daughters increasingly now that they're in college, I'll often send them sketches and ask their thoughts on stuff.

But I try not to get. Too many opinions, particularly early on because I, it can, it can lead me astray. So it's usually, you know, when I've been sitting with it for a while, it's often like an A B test, like I'll share two ideas with two captions and, and which do you prefer kind of thing.

Mikey: Okay. Well, speaking of opinions, I think one of your motifs has always been like that around idea killers and the creative process, but, and, you know, just like too many [00:13:00] voices and committees and all this stuff.

Getting squashed. Getting squashed. Love all of those. Or cut up, yeah. Highly resonant.

Molly: So many fun metaphors you have with it, yes. Yeah,

Mikey: yeah.

Molly: That's definitely a theme in the book.

Mikey: What do you think is a good, like, Have you observed better working relationships at certain organizations where like ideas don't get squashed and like, what makes that a healthier process?

Tom: Yeah, I think I, it definitely helped me as a marketer being a cartoonist because I go into creative review sessions and because I was creating myself every week, I would see what would happen to the ideas, even though I was on the other side of the table. And it helped me get a little bit better at how to give feedback, for instance.

Molly: Definitely.

Tom: I think there are a couple of things I've learned over time that make really good partnerships. A big one is, you touched on the idea of committees, like often with creative work you have a lot of people with a vested interest. And I think being really clear what people's roles are and [00:14:00] the idea, I've heard it best expressed as everybody has a voice, but not everybody has a vote, like ultimately having one sort of editor decision maker that might hear everything and weigh them.

But often, you know, the worst thing that can happen is if you try to take everybody's opinion and somehow to ram it into doing everything and then you end up standing for nothing. So I try to, that's one dynamic I try to, I try to zero in on. Another one is just up front when you have a creative project like how you actually write a brief and it's it's completely overlooked in most pieces of creative work that I've seen it's treated as this kind of a tick box exercise where you might take a brief that is floating around the office and like copy and paste it and then just cram a whole bunch of stuff into it.

Have too many things you want to do with one piece of creative, all of that stuff. I feel like I learned over time that if you're on the marketing side of the table, like the client side of the table, and you write just a killer brief, like really take the time to say what you're trying to say, put the right research in there, [00:15:00] that's the best way to get a level work out of the creative team.

Because the bar is so low, most of the briefs, if they happen at all, are just not that coordinated. And so adding a little extra attention at that stage. Is the best thing it's then to be, you know, otherwise it can be garbage in garbage out. Those two simple tricks of like, you know, writing a great brief and then being really clear when you're around the review table, how, what you're going to do with feedback, like is dramatically changes the output.

Molly: Yeah, those are good actionable steps. A brief backup just for added context. You went to Harvard business school and that's when you started doodling again, but did you find yourself, I mean, you're a creative person. In these brands that you are marketing for, were you on the design side or were you on the marketer side?

And is that, yeah, what, what perspective did you have around those tables?

Tom: Yeah. So most of the time I was on the marketer side. So I came out of business school, you know, went into classic brand management. I was at General Mills. I was at Nestle. Right, right. Those were very hierarchical creative processes.

It changed a bit when I [00:16:00] joined Method, which is this soap company, but I joined them when they were really small and they were started by the company had a lot of A lot of creativity on the inside. And we worked with agencies, but the idea was like, we were, we weren't going to be able to out Clorox Clorox.

So the only way we were gonna be able to win as if we were a super creative shop on the inside. And that's really where the light bulb went off for me that we all had to be a lot more creative in our day to day work and the briefing and those kinds of things came out as a part of that. So all of my, all of my classic marketing training came from being sort of the marketing client.

Then when I started doing the cartoon full time. 14 years ago, I really operated more as an agency model, and then I was the creative. And that's what I've been doing the last 14 years. We've worked with over 200 different companies on campaigns that use cartoons as a communication medium. And in that case, I was pitching ideas and all that kind of stuff.

So suddenly I was on the other side of the table. And it helped me the fact that I'd been, I'd been on both sides of the table. I can navigate it. I noticed things early on that were happening that [00:17:00] might, you know, dilute the work or lead to an output that wasn't. What we wanted and I could call attention to it.

And I would often use humor and cartoons to do that.

Mikey: That's awesome. Totally. Like you, Tom been kind of on both sides as well, but been early as a creative in the agency space, I struggled and got frustrated a lot because my, my concepts never like made it through or were chosen. And I realized looking back, I just kind of sucked at communicating and.

And even trying to sell the division and, you know, I kind of thought ideas should sell themselves. What role have you seen like soft skills and presentation skills in having seen like campaigns either bought or not?

Tom: Yes, it's said the soft skills are so important. I kind of, I had to learn two things. I had to learn how to stand up for my ideas.

But also not fall in love with my ideas. And so when I'm coming up with cartoons, for instance, for a client, I always create at least twice as many cartoons as we need, because I'd much rather that one of the cartoons just didn't make it for whatever reason, [00:18:00] then to try to shoe worn feedback into a cartoon and then end up like having it so bloated and, or watered down that it, it just wasn't, it didn't have anything going for it any longer.

So, you know, the practice of learning how to stand up for my ideas, like, Like sometimes when feedback would come, well, can we just have three more characters in this cartoon and have them say all these other things? And even though the joke is about this topic, and we also add this other related topic, and I would have to say, like, it sounds like you're asking for five cartoons, not one, if we try to do all that in one, you're just going to make it not funny.

Like you can wait, you know, there's a, it's a delicate balancing act of communication where you just can lose the humor. And I think a lot of it comes from having enough credibility on the, um, at the, at the start of it, I, I found that, you know, I've never done any selling to clients, every bit of every client work we've done has been in, down through people who already know my work and know my cartoons.

And the benefit of that is that every, every time we have our initial creative brief meeting, they know [00:19:00] my work and there's some respect there. And oftentimes they'll even voice it as we know you're the expert in this. And so I just take that mantle that. They're the expert on their brand and their business, but I'm the expert in knowing how to communicate this thing.

And so we ultimately will need to work together. And that requires me being flexible and trying to understand their point of view. But it also, you know, I also need to remember that I'm coming to this with some authority and some expertise and they, they're hiring me for that. And so it is the balance of those things.

And then the soft skills and how do you communicate it that have helped a lot of the projects over time, but it's not easy. I'm always learning.

Molly: Yeah, definitely. I think that's something, it's amazing what you can offer at Marketoonist because yes, hopefully people are familiar, but it's something people really struggle with as you very expertly make fun of in your book.

People, marketers tend to turn stuff, every message into one single platform or message or, you know, about the, you had something about people gathering around writing their first tweet and there was like all these, you know, it obviously far exceeded the word count [00:20:00] and the disclaimer, the legal disclaimers I had to go through and, you know, The event already happened last week, like, such a funny punchline where it didn't even, like, roll out on time, you know, so I think for people, for you to tap into this very, like, simple, But truthful form of communication, it's definitely something people, you know, recruiters need help with.

There's so many ways that brand stories can get pulled.

Tom: Myself included. Like if I'm ever making fun of anybody, it's myself because I've been that person at some time. Yeah. I've been the one trying to cram in too many. Too many ideas into a single minor proposition. I've been the one trying to, so I, I try to, I'd come at it with a, with a lot of humility and I'm always learning.

And usually when something goes wrong, I, I can at least think of this will make a good cartoon. Yeah. Yeah.

Molly: Oh yeah. You should see my long winded newsletters. I first tried to run by Mikey and he's like, well, you got to get to this down to a third of this, the coffee, the pressure. Do less. You know, it's a good, it's a good

Tom: exercise for us.

Mikey: Well, Tom, you've been [00:21:00] on a TED Talk stage and for us, that sounds, it's like the holy grail of, you know, that's where presenters want to be. We're fans. Yeah. So we always want to know, like, what was that like and everything from like submitting the idea to preparing it to has it benefited your career, you know, afterward?

Yeah. We'd love to hear about what it was like. Ted talking.

Tom: I've been such an admirer of that whole kind of platform and organization and the way they approach it for such a long time. And I got to go to Ted once as a, I had a friend who, who offered me his ticket when he wasn't able to go. So I went to the main tent festival at one point.

And so I'm a big admirer of all of that. And it'd been in my. My back of my mind at some point, I'd love to, you know, think about a TED talk. What would I talk about? All that kind of thing. And then out of the blue, I got an email from the TED organization inviting me to come to a special TED event they were hosting at their headquarters.

And suddenly it was like a real, I was like, Oh, wow, I guess I have to come up with something now I've been sort of thinking about at that point. So I pitched the idea of the power of laughing at [00:22:00] ourselves at work and they like that idea.

Music: Yeah,

Tom: I had already been doing a lot of presenting like as a paid keynote speaker, but this was different.

It was shorter. It was only 12 minutes tough. They usually when I present at a conference like I use my cartoons as the principal way that I communicate. But I'll often have a breakup like a 10 panel cartoon into 10 slides on show panel by panel and I kind of act them out I do story, you know, storytelling, but I have a ton of slides.

And so when I presented, I sent my presentation deck, they were like, you, we only want to use this many slides maximum. So it's going to be a very different style of presenting. And then secondly, they wanted me to have a script, which I'd never done before. And I, I usually have my cartoons up and I just talk off the cuff, but they, they wanted me to have the discipline of actually writing a script.

And it was a very different style. I was worried it would come across as too stilted, but it ultimately helped impact me going forward because I've learned that it's okay to have a script and [00:23:00] actually repetition really helps you get better at it. And so I've learned over time, rather than write to a talk, I talk to a write, I kind of like will present to my iPad and record it and use like AI software to make a script out of how I actually speak.

And then that prints out a script that I then will. Red pen it to get to a point of where it's tighter and tighter and tighter over time. And while I don't do it verbatim by having a script, it's made me a more organized and disciplined presenter. And I thought that would get in the way of my talking.

It actually ended up giving me more confidence because I have that platform of the script. So anyway, those are a couple of things I learned through the act, the process of developing the talk with them, because I'm like a lot of places where I speak. They want me to do. Test runs with them and they would give feedback and I would distill it down to the place when I actually kind of flew to New York and was a part of this event.

Molly: That's great. That's I guess exemplifies Ted's you know foundation is. You know, they really care about the speaker and the talk, whereas sometimes I think [00:24:00] conferences might not realize that a test run would be useful for a speaker.

Tom: Right.

Molly: I think that's really cool to hear you say that you go talk to script, because I think when we've given like advice, and certainly people that aren't as familiar with giving presentations are so keen to just write everything down, but I talk so differently than I write and it sounds, and it's obvious, like it just doesn't sound as authentic sometimes, it sounds a little more canned.

So I think it's a really helpful tip to try speaking, maybe record yourself like you said, and then have that convert to a script. And have that be your talk track of sorts. Yes. Very helpful.

Tom: Yes. It was, I went to a speaker training workshop earlier this year and they were, that was one of the things they suggested too and it, it helped me, I do it more, I'm in a zone right now where I'm doing a lot of that, like I'm working on some new keynote material and I'm really trying to practice having it tighter and tighter and using a script as a way to get more efficient at it.

Mikey: Did you have a teleprompter at the TED? No,

Tom: I didn't. And that was the other thing. I usually part of the benefit of having so many [00:25:00] slides as I do is I, I can always look at the slide. It reminds me coming next with Ed. It was, I had a moment. I'd rehearsed it so much. But when I was on stage, there was a moment where I was like, I don't know what's coming next.

I had this moment of panic. And thankfully I hadn't enough muscle memory when I got to the end, it kind of came up and I did it, but it didn't show, but that was, it was a different experience. Yeah.

Molly: Yeah. That's really cool. And can you speak to, I guess, yeah, Ted was so specific and different than your typical speaker and keynote experience.

How do you go about building your, Speaker and keynotes.

Tom: Yeah. So I, I start always with the ideas. I, I, I used to start with PowerPoint and they were criminal, but just up into it. And I tried to shape it around it as something that came to logical narrative. Now I start with a whiteboard with. In areas of what I really want to talk about in sticky notes to really mix and match and move things around.

And that helps me get more structured and then the PowerPoint is the last step. Where I actually like, once I have the narrative structure and what I'm trying to do, [00:26:00] what things will be, you know, play a certain role in different parts of the presentation, then, then I turn to PowerPoint or Keynote or what, I'm pretty software, you know, Agnostic like for me, it's just a tool and means to an end.

But once I have the structure that I can turn to the software to build the right presentation. And some of this, I mentioned that this speaker training, Michael and Amy port are the two. Who created the amazing organization to help people become debtor presenters. And I went to a two day workshop with them.

That was, I really opened my eyes, even as someone who's given a lot of keynotes over time, how I can sort of take my keynote speaking to the next level. And so this year has been a lot about getting more, um, just disciplined and how I present. And I've noticed over time, I just came off of a six week speaking tour.

And, uh, the, the results on stage were significantly better because I was getting more disciplined and trying to give, at least have some repeatable sections of my talks that I can dial in and get better at over time.

Mikey: That's awesome. Michael Port and Amy, they're, they're amazing. We [00:27:00] wouldn't have them on, but I know Michael was coauthor of the Referrable Speaker, which is a really cool book he wrote with Andrew Davis.

Tom: With Andrew Davis, so I got to meet at an event last year. Oh, that's cool. That's really helped unlock a lot of my thinking around speaking

Mikey: as well. So presentations in business are like a love hate sort of thing. They get. Yeah. You've got some amazing content I On Market by PowerPoint. Yes. Power PowerPoint.

And yet, like we've seen some career changing presentations. We've seen it go well, but like 99 percent of them are kind of crappy afterthoughts, right? Where you just kind of, people just dump their bullets. And what's your take on this? And, and like, do you see value in presentations within the business world?

And like, if so, how can we get more value out of it? The medium,

Tom: there's, there's so much value. Like I've seen so much value in presenting in the business world, but the first approach to it is often thinking about it less as a presentation and more as an artifact. Uh, when I was at, when I was at general mills, they, they were very strict about, okay, when you're, [00:28:00] when you're pitching something, this is exactly how many slides you have and you use this point font and usually you'd end up with something with like a headline, a bunch of bullet points, and it was just this dense.

Thing that you go into a meeting and you go from the top to the bottom and the whole it was it was the way we presented ideas inside the organization. And it works as an artifact. Like you could have, you know, a hundred brands and it could roll up to somebody who's looking at across a hundred brands and see the consistency, but it's not how you present and how you drive, you persuade or get people excited about something.

And so it's a very different approach. And so I find. That, you know, that has its place, but as far as a real presentation goes, it operates by a whole different set of set of rules. The word count should be, you know, as few words as possible, images go a long way. You know, what are you trying to say to beginning to end?

And it's just when I see business presentations that are built to present, then it could be incredibly persuasive and, and again, [00:29:00] working in method was one of those places where we really operated that way. It was sort of like, it was more about. Start with an idea, what's the most incredible way to communicate that idea?

And slides can all often be really impactful on how to do that, but the, but the slides are a means to an end. And so don't confuse, you know, I'm building a PowerPoint deck with, I wanna present this idea and I might use PowerPoint as a way to do that.

Molly: I'm just gonna call out a few of my favorite part death by PowerPoint references in your book,

With your permission, I'll add these maybe to the show notes. Yeah, please show notes. But there's one, you know, with death by PowerPoint and you're in the conference. Through and it's just basically a crime scene with people's bodies. Outline. Yeah, the chalk outline too. Fun.

Mikey: Hilarious.

Molly: I also particularly loved the man in his bedroom who's like presenting with a, with a projector and stuff to his wife.

And she's like, Oh, no, you've forgotten how to not communicate in a presentation for just because they're so pervasive.

Tom: I like the punchline on that one. He says, I'll take questions at the end. Exactly. [00:30:00]

Molly: Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

Mikey: Are there any lessons from like that you've, you can apply from cartooning into building better slides potentially?

Tom: Yeah, I feel like part of the less is more thing that we talked about earlier. I think partly using humor, certainly at different stages. The way I present usually, I use my cartoons to try to get people laughing about things they identify with, and then I'll, and then I shift out of cartoon mode and I'll have a couple photos.

That helped me tell a story of some kind of some business or an executive who's, who's, who's approached it in a different way. So that balance of like getting people laughing at a shared experience, you know, however you choose to do that can be a great way into a presentation. And that comes from cartooning.

Like there's, you know, humor can be an active empathy. I love this vaudeville expression that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. And so you can have this moment of like shared experience. You know, where it's, you know, it like, like pops the balloon and you're like, Oh my God, it's okay to like, we're all, we're all on the same page here.

And then you can, then you can [00:31:00] shift into a different style of presenting, which is more about information sharing. So balancing the, the hook, the laughter with some sort of information sharing is a, is a big part of the balance I've, I've learned from cartooning, isn't it? Awesome.

Molly: Definitely. We've studied a bit of comedy on the cast as well, and just, it's the best comedy tells the truth.

So. Yes, it definitely captures that.

Tom: Yes, and the bar and the bar for humor is so low in business. Like it doesn't mean that you have somebody that's being a comedian. I think it's just often like having a moment of openness, maybe, maybe in a self deprecating way, but a moment of just being human goes a long way.

You know, humor is a shorthand. Humor is a shorthand for being human. And if you can be human at the start, it kind of like, it's like it puts you in a different plane than when you just start out with bullet points and data points.

Molly: Yeah, and if you can laugh at your problems, then maybe you can address the problems to be like, What is going wrong with the social media strategy?

We're laughing about it. Now we're actually talking about it. Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. Speaking of social media, Mike, you've got this highlighted. You're [00:32:00] another main theme of your book, which, yeah, like we said, ranges 15 years of your career in marketing. Cartooning along the way, you saw, like, the birth of social media and marketers quickly rushing to create some kind of strategy or.

Uh, meaning out of what these platforms, uh, were to like young people and what it meant for the internet and businesses, could you speak to a little bit about you, uh, your experience witnessing that evolution?

Tom: Yeah. It's, it turned out that 2002 to 2017, like the span of the cartoons in that book, that's an interesting stage of marketing.

Like a lot of things were shifting and I found, you know, in a way, my cartoons were a bit of like a diary for me. So these things would come along. I would just observe around me. So often, you know, marketing is, is a fun area to make fun of because. Every marketer is also ultimately a consumer and a real person, et cetera.

But sometimes you can end up in a marketing ivory tower where you start to breathe your own exhaust and think about things from a brand point of view so much, and so a lot of the role I had was just sort of trying to widen the lens, hold up the [00:33:00] mirror on how. Some of the way we were talking about as marketers, what we were trying to do, how that would actually be received, you know, people, you know, in the early days of social media, they were connecting because they wanted to connect with their friends and can meet, express themselves and communicate.

They weren't thinking, I can't wait to communicate with my yogurt brand this way. So like having little moments that you could sort of just pop the bubble of like how this might actually be received. I love that there's a, I don't know, people don't read advertising. They read things that interest them.

And that's sometimes that's an ad, you know, it's just a little bit of a shift on how you, how you approach. What you're doing when you're working with a brand and so yeah anyway I found so much humor in that and I still do

Mikey: I loved your Inside the mind of a brain of a consumer with like the parts of their brain Yes, and they're like I don't get it that our brand of pickle relish isn't anywhere in there Exactly, this is a brand loyalist, but yeah, we take ourselves so seriously that we forget.

Yeah. Oh, yeah Like [00:34:00] people have other things going on

Tom: They

Mikey: have other things going on. Yeah, I

Molly: like to work with Waldo who gets like the, the out of touch text or something. And he's like, they have no idea where I am on the customer journey. Yes.

Mikey: Yeah. And Tom, I think it's so, I've heard the quote, like history doesn't repeat itself.

People do. Yeah. So you, you watch this, everyone's scrambling. Oh, we got to, we got to ramp our branding. Oh, we got to catch up with social media. And I assume now, and I know you're, you're talking a lot about AI. We're getting so much pressure. Oh, we got to, we need an AI strategy. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, zooming out, like you have become kind of almost like a historian of marketing now, like looking back at your work and curious what you think.

What are you having fun poking fun at these days? What do you think is, uh, is next in marketing's evolution?

Tom: Well, I think it's so funny because it's, it's, uh, it's a history of constant change. And yet there's some like eternal truisms and, uh, the sort of the, the eternal truism. I drew a cartoon a while ago, they had a bunch of dogs around a conference table and like they're saying, we need to stay [00:35:00] focused.

And then one of them was like, well, it's squirrel. And they're all looking out the window. Like I drew that cartoon a while ago, but that is as relevant as ever. With AI or whatever it is, it's not to say those things don't impact what we do. They do. They really do. But if we approach it as like, what's my strategy for TikTok, as opposed to what's our, what's our strategy as a brand.

And then maybe TikTok can help advance that it, that it's a different way of looking at it. And it's definitely the case with AI, because there's a herd mentality of we need to jump on this. But it's how you do it because everybody, every other brand has access to the same tools. And if you're just, just going a million directions at once, trying to be on the next thing or go viral.

Yeah. How, how do we, how do we do this in a way that actually

So I try, I do try to use cartoons to kind of like hold up the mirror on those moments, but also I just find it really funny, you know, when I see, when I see examples of when, when [00:36:00] brands are just jumping in the wrong, you know, wrong direction or doing it in the wrong way. There's just a lot of funny things happening there.

And I, again, I laugh mostly at myself because I can imagine myself doing the same thing, jumping on the same bandwagon, but ultimately. It's ultimately how you, how you use those.

Mikey: They're so good.

Molly: I know.

Mikey: We want to ask some, some lightning round stuff. We'll get into the spice cabinet, Tom, if that's cool with you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly: Into the spice cabinet.

Mikey: We like to get inside the heads of, you know, like some of our heroes here. And so we'd, we'd love to know where you go for inspiration or if there's any, any like books, resources, other cartoonists that you follow that you like to recommend.

Tom: Absolutely. Well, in the vein of presenting, I don't know if you're familiar with Russell Davies, but he's an ad planner who is also a wired columnist.

He's done a million different things, but he, uh, he wrote a book, everything I needed to know. I learned through power point is definitely if you're not familiar with his work, he'd be a great guy to talk to, uh, and get to know, get to know his work. Uh, he's, he, I had, I had the opportunity to live in England for a few years.

He's, he's, he's [00:37:00] British. Yeah. And he put on for many years, uh, a regular conference called interesting. And his big insight was like, if you want to be interesting, you have to be interested and go out and find things that interest you. And so he, he, he practices what he preaches and he's just an incredible source of creativity.

And I get a lot of inspiration from his work, certainly like in the presentation world and outside. So that's one, one go to source within cartoony. I just, I've always loved cartooning. Gary Larson, Farside was, it's certainly like my original hero and continues to be, and how he can stigmatize something absurdist into a single panel cartoon.

There's a French cartoonist, Jean Jacques Sompé. Who has done a lot of New Yorker covers, and I love how most of his humor has come through an illustration that doesn't even have any words at all. Sometimes you don't need words at all to really tell a compelling story. And so he's, he's like, you know, like I'm looking at his work is like a masterclass on how to distill things down to the bare essence that can still be funny.

So I [00:38:00] love Jean Jacques Sempé. And Hillary Price is one of my favorite kind of ongoing current cartoonists. Her cartoon strip Rhymes with Orange is always a, always a great go to and how you can be, be funny and also there's a, the cartoons are deceptively simple. There's so much thought that goes into it to get to a place where it can look like it was drawn in such a simple way.

And she's, I'm a big fan of, of Hillary and her work.

Molly: Love it. We're going to link all of these so people can. Tune in. It's a, it's refreshing. You know, I feel like cartoons are the original meme, in a way. Yes, yeah. Because this is such, it's referential, it says like, you know, you need some previous, it's part of an inside joke, in a way, too.

It is, yes. I think it'll be helpful for people to get some fresh inspiration. Well, Tom, what advice would you give to someone Who is like as a self described maybe creative or even someone that says, I'm not a creative person that's in the marketing field, but has to, you know, engage with the creative aspects to communicate big ideas.

Tom: My biggest advice would be don't be afraid [00:39:00] to actually draw like you don't need to be a great artist to draw. You can do simple shapes to illustrate ideas. Even stick figures sometimes can be more compelling than a dense PowerPoint slide. And oftentimes. I used to go into my, my daughter's classrooms when they were younger and teach cartooning and I'd walk in and I would say, how many of you like to draw?

And they all jump out of the chairs and wave their hands. And if I ask that in a room full of adults, you may be 10%. And the rest of the people often are like, I'm not a good artist, etc. I think if you can push past that discomfort to actually just share ideas in the back of an envelope sketch. It can be incredibly powerful and it can be a great way from the going back to the soft skills we were talking about earlier.

If you want to communicate an idea, do a back of the envelope sketch and share that with somebody before you have a fully baked PowerPoint presentation that looks like it's final because at the back of the envelope sketch. It's clear that it's still fluid and never changing and and you oftentimes can get people's [00:40:00] buy in at that stage.

I remember I heard the head of design for BMW once give a talk, Chris Bangle, and his entire presentation was nothing but his hand drawn stick figure drawings of stick figures talking and like communicating ideas. And it was such a powerful presentation because it was instantly relatable to everybody.

With a stick figure, you can't go down the marketing, uh, you know, terminology over complicating idea thing. He kept it really simple. And so I think my biggest advice is, particularly if you're creative, like, and you're used to working with software, like, get back to basics with a Sharpie and a blank sheet of paper and try to communicate helpful things that way first.

Molly: Pin the paper. Tom, we love your book. We love it. Like, you know, we're going to link your website where you do consultations on Mark Attunis and keynoting. Any plans you can share with the listeners of what's, what's next for you?

Tom: I am really enjoying getting out and going and doing keynotes, speaking different places.

Like it's been a third of what [00:41:00] I do. My goal over the next few years is to make it two thirds. Nice. Because I love it so much. I just came back from five weeks in, in Europe, uh, with five talks in different countries. And to be in front of people and presenting ideas and connecting live, it's so fun. So I'm really leaning in that direction and I want to do a lot more of that next year.

Could involve a new book. As well, and that will be, you know, coming out of some of the things I'm speaking about when I speak, but I'm, uh, that, that's a direction I'm really leaning in and, and, and often speaking audiences who are not marketers, like any, any sort of business person, the idea of humor is this underappreciated leadership skill.

That's a real direction I'm headed into next.

Molly: Cool. Wow. We're really looking forward to that. And, uh, yeah, if anyone's. needing to book their conference speaker next year. And might I just say, I think this, uh, your book, your ad ignored here would be such a fun colleague gift for anyone you've spent too much time in the conference room with.

So coming into, uh, the holiday season here, we will link that.

Tom: I appreciate that. [00:42:00]

Molly: You know what,

Mikey: you know what? Every really good keynote needs a really good walkout song. So Tom Fishburne, we have to know presentation nation. We're dying to know what's your. What's your go to pump up walkout song?

Molly: This is our consistent question.

I think we took a stab at it when we did your TED Talking episode. We always get it wrong. So I want to, I don't know what we said for you. We'll look it up.

Tom: I can't remember either. But yeah, my go to for a long time has been, uh, Jack White, Seven Nations Army.

Like that's been my go to. I don't know how it started, but my kids do it now. And one of them came to one of my talks in the spring. And just before I was getting ready to go backstage, she had it queued up. You know, our phone with, with their, with their AirPods and put it in and seven nations army got to be coming here on.

That's great. Mikey

Molly: guest. I just looked it up. Uh, this was episode 131. We will link this as well in the spice cabinet. Like you guessed, Roses Are Free by Weem. It's totally off. I

Mikey: don't want it, [00:43:00] I've got to put it on. Completely different vibe, but I, Seven Nations Army is the way to go. Yeah, yeah. It's awesome.

Sometimes we go really literal or

Molly: punny with it, and sometimes it's just out of the box. It's a

Mikey: feeling, yeah. Well, Tom, thank you. It's been an honor to have you on, and we know you have so many fans out there, so like, again, visit the website, sign up, subscribe to the newsletter, because it's gold every week.

Thank you. So fun. Yeah, this has been so

Molly: fun, Tom.

Mikey: Yeah. Any parting shots before we let you go?

Tom: I've loved this conversation. It was great. I'm a big, I mean, the idea of ways to present better, I think it's just something that everybody can, there's always room for improvement there.

Mikey: Awesome, Tom. Absolutely, yeah.

Well, thank you. Hope you, hope you stay dry out there. We know you're getting the, the river of pain or whatever.

Molly: Atmospheric river. Atmospheric river. That's what you said, yeah. Tom's in the West Coast. But yeah, in, in addition to uh, keep on, keep on pitching, keep on doodling, everybody.

Mikey: That's right. Love it.

Love it. Alright, until next time. Thanks for hanging

[00:44:00] out.