You can now watch Tom Fishburne’s full talk at this event here

As part of Dylan’s forum events we are welcoming Tom Fishburne (a.k.a The Marketoonist) from San Francisco. Tom will be giving a specialist talk on behalf of Dylan on how we are all responsible for setting a company’s culture and how essentially the HR department are the new Marketing department! Tom speaks regularly as the Marketoonist about creativity, marketing, and innovation, using his cartoons and marketing career to tell the story visually.  As Tom says, “If a picture tells a thousand words, a cartoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides.”

In preparation for this special event, we spoke to Tom who had this to say:

“I am excited to share my take on how we are all responsible for setting the culture of the businesses where we work.  I speak frequently about marketing, but rarely about the crucial, but often overlooked role of recruiting in how a brand is marketed.

The big focus of my talk for Dylan is how the best brands and businesses “market from the inside out”.  We all work in marketing, no matter our functional expertise.  Everyone in the company has the ability to impact the brand, whether they work in accounts payable or marketing. That means that the HR Director is the new Marketing Director.  Recruitment is as important to how a brand is marketed as creating a marketing plan.

I’ll share a number of examples of homework assignments and other tactics that ensured that the right talent ended up on the team, as well as examples of how recruitment choices produced amazing marketing.”

Tom started drawing cartoons at Harvard Business School by doodling on the backs of business cases.  He later started Marketoonist to develop cartoon campaigns as a form of content marketing.  As example is a Unilever cartoon campaign for career planning.  Other campaigns were developed for Wall Street Journal Asia, Kimberly Clark, Kronos, and Motista.  Tom says, “cartoons have a superhuman ability to break through the clutter.  They thrive in social media, accelerate PR, and cut through email inboxes in a single bound.”

Before Marketoonist, Tom had a 15-year career in consumer marketing in the US and UK.  Most recently, he was VP at Method Products, the innovative home care brand, and he previously led brands at Nestle and General Mills.

We’re delighted to have such a great, world renowned speaker coming to talk to you all, we too can’t wait! What Tom didn’t say when we spoke to him was that his cartoons now reach over 100,000 marketers every week (you may have seen them in Marketing Week) and The Huffington Post ranked his South By Southwest talk the third best of the conference out of 500.

You can find out more about Tom and see more of his work here and see him in action here