This Is Why You Hate Your Marketing Job

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Being a marketer is either the best job in the world or the worst one, and it comes down to two things: whether you believe in what you're marketing, and whether you can actually get results. Most marketers right now have neither.

If you're aligned with your CEO in the planning meeting and underwater a quarter later, this is the diagnosis. It isn't effort and it isn't your playbook. It's the trust gap between what the CEO holds in their head and what you're executing against. Jacob went through five marketing leaders in eight years before he admitted he was the common denominator, and then hit the same wall with the sixth, the one person he was certain he'd been clear with. What came out of fixing that

is VSET: Vision, Strategy, Execution, Team. This video is the introduction to the framework and the place to start on this channel.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Why marketing is either the best or the worst job in the world

2:28 The cycle: aligned in the meeting, underwater a quarter later

3:43 The trust gap, and why executing harder won't close it

4:14 Five marketing leaders in eight years, and the moment I realized I was the

common denominator

5:21 What happened with Chad, the one person I was sure I'd been clear with

7:33 VSET explained: Vision, Strategy, Execution, Team

8:32 Why most marketers start with execution, and why that breaks everything

9:00 You are not the problem. The system you're working in is.

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WHO'S TALKING

Jacob Baadsgaard is the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising and the author of The Indispensable Marketer. He's sat in every seat at the table: data analyst, marketing director at a publicly traded company, and now the CEO asking marketing for a number. Over 14 years he's built Disruptive to more than $150 million in lifetime revenue, employed over 500 marketers, and worked with thousands of businesses. He's also been the CEO he admits he'd have struggled to work for.

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ABOUT THE SHOW

The Indispensable Marketer is Disruptive Advertising's podcast. We're a performance marketing agency, and our mission is to connect great marketers with the brands they believe in. The goal of this show is simpler than that: we want

marketing leaders to win. Not just hit the number, but earn the trust and the seat that comes with it.

For anyone who has no reason to trust us yet, some things you can check:

We've managed marketing for more than 2,000 client accounts.

When we studied those accounts, we found that on average 76% of ad budget had no attributable revenue impact. Not low impact. No impact. That's the problem we exist to solve.

We reject 96% of applicants, because the wrong person in the wrong seat costs everyone.

We publish around 8 videos a month. We want these to be the episodes you forward to your CEO or drop in your team's channel, because you're both better on the

other side of it.

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FREE RESOURCES: indispensablemarketer.com/free/  

Indispensable Marketer assessment: https://assessment.disruptiveuniversity.com/imaudit

Disruptive Advertising: https://disruptiveadvertising.com/

The Indispensable Marketer (book): https://www.indispensablemarketer.com/book/

Connect with Jacob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakebaadsgaard/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Being a marketer is either the best or the worst job in the world. And it comes down to just two basic things. Number one, do you believe in what you're marketing? Because if you don't, you just feel like you're lying every day. And number two, are you actually able to achieve the results that you're after? And right now, I see so many marketers that are dead on the inside marketing for things they don't believe in, not getting the results that they're looking for, and then they feel like if that wasn't bad enough, AI is coming for my job now. I'm struggling to the economy and the market feels like shit. And I just cannot get on the same page with the CEO. It feels like no matter what I do, I'm feeling underappreciated and frankly, dispensable. But there are a few marketers out there that are totally indispensable right now, in spite of all the things that we just talked about, that are doing meaningful work for brands they believe in, that are totally aligned with their CEO and driving awesome results. They are indispensable. And that is what I want for you to make that transition, to really elevate the brands and the work that you're doing to love marketing and to just kick ass. But who am I to tell you about this? I am you. I've been the data analyst on the analytics side of things. I've been the marketing director at a publicly traded company and feeling that tension and disconnect between the executives and the marketing team. I've built and started and grown an agency over the last 14 years that's done over $150 million in revenue. I've employed over 500 marketers. We've worked with thousands of businesses and spent billions of dollars in marketing to see what actually works for the brands that we work with and what doesn't. So I have sat on both sides of the table. I've been the marketer that feels like no matter what I do, it's not enough. Or the CEO that's coming and asking the hard questions and feeling like we need more with less budget. And I just get both sides in a way that is unique and how I can show up and support. But let me be honest with you, the odds are stacked against you. And I'm gonna walk you through and break it down so that you can consciously understand why and actually do something about it. So you tell me if this sounds familiar to you. You meet with the CEO, you talk about budget, you talk about the goals, you set the targets, you're both excited, you both want to make it happen, you're eager to say yes, you're eager to please and drive the impact. So that's exactly what you do. You jump in, you execute, you get the campaigns live, you start to see some initial results, but then the market smacks you in the face, AI disrupts something, the economy shifts, things aren't going to plan in the way that you thought they would. And then to boot, the CEO says, Hey, we've got to still hit these targets, but I need you to do it with less budget. You can do that, right? And then all of a sudden, the playbook that you've been leaning on, all of that energy and enthusiasm that you had to get in and drive those results just isn't panning out the way that you thought. And how do I know this? Because it's been happening in my own business and where the whole team is working harder, but the results aren't matching. It feels stressful. It feels like burnout. And then those meetings with the CEO get more tense. We start to wonder if this is going to work out, if we need to look for something new or something different. And it feels like everyone's pointing the finger at you of why aren't the results there? What are you going to do to figure it out? And this is where the trust gap emerges between the marketer and the CEO. And it is that trust gap that is actually what's preventing our ability to drive results. It's not about executing harder. It's not about the CEO trying to vision more and get you excited more. It's actually about bridging that gap and coming together and solving that with the CEO and getting clear together. But let me just be vulnerable with you for a minute here. Is I have been that CEO that I would have struggled to work with as a marketer. The evidence was that over an eight-year period, I actually went through five different marketing leaders. And each time I thought they were the problem, not me. And at some point, I realized this keeps happening. I might be the common denominator here. I can see that I did not do my job in creating business vision clarity. It wasn't clear where we were going and why it mattered, what truly differentiated us, the outcomes we were passionate at providing, amongst a lot of other things as well, and business goals that made mathematical sense and had the marketing budget to support it. So each one of these marketing leaders would have to guess at those things and come back with what they thought it should be, and then go run and execute against it. And inevitably I would say, no, that's not what was in my head. But the reality is they aren't mind readers and they couldn't read my mind. And because I would just say, go figure it out, I set them up for failure time and time again. And then something finally shifted. It was with my sixth marketing leader, his name's Chad, that I realized what needed to happen. Because we had already worked together for eight years. And when he stepped up and into this role in the organization, I just trusted him completely to figure it out and to take us where we needed to go from a marketing standpoint because we knew each other so well already. And the funny thing is, we both trusted each other and we both thought that we were clear. But then the same outcome started happening again. We were frustrated. I thought I was clear. What he kept coming back with was missing the mark. And all of a sudden, with the one person I thought this shouldn't be an issue with, I found myself right back in the same situation again. And this was the wake-up call for me that if even working with someone that I trusted as much as Chad, who had as much working knowledge of the business and where we were going with the marketing chops to back it up, if it's still not working, something has to change. And maybe he's not the problem. And maybe I'm not even the problem. We just need to actually solve this in a way that is simple and drives the results that we're looking for. We took the time to step back and evaluate the system that we were operating with to understand where the breakdowns were actually happening so that we could address them, resolve them, and move forward. For not only he and I to be on the same page, but for him to have everything that he needed to be successful from a marketing perspective to drive the results that needed to happen, and for me to be able to see, feel, and understand that along the way as well. We took the wealth of knowledge and experience that we had, working with thousands of different businesses, but applying it very specifically to our situation and developed the system and developed the framework that made it work and go from feeling like 80% friction and 20% flow to 80% flow and 20% friction and created a great working dynamic where I do trust him completely. He is indispensable. I don't know how I would do this without him. And through this process, we birthed what we refer to as VSET. This is the framework that is changing the game and setting up CEOs and marketers to build something that they are both proud of, that bridges the trust gap as they clarify the vision for the business, as they then align the marketing strategy to that business vision, then they move into execution with confidence, effectiveness, efficiency, because it's so clear what actually needs to be happening. And then finally, team alignment, making sure that we have the right people in the right roles with the right clarity and authority to move the things forward that are needed to drive results. The challenge isn't that people don't understand what's already in this framework. What's not working is that most people don't do all of the pieces and they don't do them in the right order, because that's what leads to issues. And most marketers start with execution. They immediately jump into tactics without understanding the business vision. They immediately jump into tactics before aligning the strategy, the math, the budget, the persona, the journey, all of the things that actually matter. And because of that, when things don't produce the results that they're looking for from execution and tactical marketing, they don't understand why and they don't know what to do next. And that's where the VSET framework comes in and bridges that gap because it has clarified everything that is needed. So when marketing isn't working, we know exactly where it's not working, why it's not working, and can hypothesize a way to solve and bridge that gap. Now, to that part of you that has doubted yourself and has wondered if you are the problem, I am here to tell you that's not the case. The system that you've been operating has not set you up for success or the CEO for success. And that is what we address together on this channel. So that you can go from feeling dispensable to indispensable. So that you can go from feeling a lack of trust with the CEO to feeling like a partner with them. And right now you have one of two decisions to make, and both come with risk. The first one is to change nothing and hope it gets better. Because change is hard. Doing things a new way feels scary. And so there is a risk to change. But the bigger risk would be to do nothing different and hope it gets better. So I'm gonna leave that to you. This is kind of that red pill, blue pill moment from the Matrix. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? Do you still want to be a dispensable marketer that is concerned about job shifting every six to 12 months? Or are you ready to become indispensable and build a brand that you believe in with a CEO that you feel aligned and like a partner to? That is what is possible for you, and I'm excited to be on that journey with you.