Wall Street Journal Asia realized that most readers never made it past the front page “What’s New’s” column. This was a problem because subscriptions were starting to lapse. So, editors redesigned the paper to make it easier to find good content.  Wall Street Journal readers are notorious time-pressed road warriors, so the paper needed an engaging way to announce the redesign and prove its value.

I created a 20-page cartoon book that provided a visual tour of the new Wall Street Journal Asia.  I used cartoons and storytelling to walk through each section in the Journal with provocative humor.

Wall Street Journal Asia inserted the cartoon book in 84,000 issues across the Asia Pacific.  A cartoon book tucked into the Journal cut through the clutter.  The cartoon campaign was deemed so successful that they expanded the program to new reader outreach and marketing events across the region.

"Time Well Spent helps us connect to our customers, employees, and the world at large (Jim Kizielewicz, CMO)"

Kronos makes workforce management software that tracks the movements of employees all over the world. It’s an industry with a serious mission to improve productivity. Kronos saw the potential of exposing the lighter side of workforce management.

I create an ongoing weekly cartoon series called Time Well Spent that profiles the humorous side of workforce management. I interviewed scores of employees across Kronos to mine the funniest stories of workforce management gone awry. This reinforces Kronos’ brand position that “workforce management doesn’t have to be so hard”. But, more importantly, it allows Kronos to talk to its customers each and every week. The cartoons are about the industry, not the company, so they aren’t seen as advertising. They allow Kronos to host and engage in a conversation.

Since launch, the cartoon has grown virally and many of the cartoon ideas are now coming from readers who are sharing their stories with Kronos. Kronos is using the cartoons to complement their PR, social media, and sales presentations in their markets around the world.

Launching a book is a hyper-competitive activity.  Thousands of new book titles are released every quarter, each jockeying to get attention from readers, journalists, and booksellers.  When Epicurious Editor Tanya Wenman Steel planned the book release of “Real Food for Healthy Kids”, she needed a way to stand out in the news cycle.

I created a campaign featuring a single cartoon that captured the book’s premise in an instant.  Tanya not only featured “If Kids Designed the Food Pyramid” in her marketing and PR outreach, she included the cartoon in her book.

The cartoon headlined stories in MSNBC and Treehugger, but also took on social media life, appearing in some of the most widely read blogs like SwissMiss as well as thousands of Facebook pages of potential readers.  Everywhere the cartoon travelled, it elevated Tanya’s book.  It played a vital role in the media platform of her book launch.

"Tom uniquely combines a cartoonist's eye and a marketer's mind (Steve d'Alencon, CMO)"

E-discovery is an emerging industry built on the obligation to exchange documents when companies are in a lawsuit. E-discovery pioneer CaseCentral wanted to increase its visibility in the industry. And it didn’t want to simply rhapsodize about its products and services or start a blog which was the tactic taken by most other companies.

I created an ongoing weekly cartoon series called Case in Point that has some fun with important e-discovery concepts and enables CaseCentral to connect with clients, prospects, and the industry at large, every week. The topical nature of a weekly cartoon propels CaseCentral into water cooler conversations and email conversations when e-discovery news breaks. We also engage with readers interactively with caption contests and tradeshow promotions.

Case in Point is not only a key part of the CaseCentral marketing plan; it allows them to have a voice in many venues where traditional marketing can’t go.  Cartoons regularly appear in newsgroups that are otherwise non-commercial, client’s offices as framed prints, and even legal textbooks.

Unilever has tens of thousands of marketers around the world. Communicating to all of them in an engaging way is a real challenge for the Chief Marketing Officer. When Unilever CMO Simon Clift needed to announce a new career planning program, he sought to break the rules of traditional corporate communication.

I created a cartoon mini-series that drove home the points from the CMOs talk in visual form. Cartoons exposed some of the lunacies of the current system and succinctly captured the benefits of the new. Simon revealed the cartoons one-by-one in a global webcast with all Unilever marketing and HR employees at once. The cartoons engaged better than a stale PowerPoint presentation. They also illustrated the career planning program in follow-up materials.