Jacob Baadsgaard

ABOUT THE BOOK

Marketing leaders are exhausted from trying to read their CEOs’ minds, while CEOs are frustrated that one marketing hire after another fails to deliver their vision. Jacob Baadsgaard knows this cycle firsthand. After going through five marketing leaders, he realized the recurring problem was not simply the people he hired. His vision lived in his head, yet he expected marketers to execute it without the clarity, context, and authority they needed.

In The Indispensable Marketer, Baadsgaard introduces VSET: Vision, Strategy, Execution, and Team. The practical framework helps CEOs and marketers close the Trust Gap, align marketing with business goals, measure what matters, and build a relationship grounded in trust and accountability. Today, Baadsgaard and his head of marketing, Chad de Lisle, are close friends and trusted partners, proving that the cycle of resentment, micromanagement, and turnover can be broken.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacob Baadsgaard is the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising, the agency he bootstrapped to more than $150 million in lifetime revenue. Across more than 2,000 client engagements, his company has managed more than $3 billion in marketing spend, and he has employed and developed more than 500 marketers. Having worked as a marketer, agency leader, and CEO, he brings a rare perspective to the relationship between marketing leaders and the executives they serve.

Baadsgaard is the author of The Indispensable Marketer, which helps marketers move from order-takers to trusted stewards of growth. He lives in Utah with Teresa, his wife of more than twenty years, and their four children. When he is not writing, teaching, or building, he can often be found running the canyon near his home.

TALKING POINTS

• The CEO who fired five marketing leaders before realizing he was the common denominator.
• Why talented marketing leaders feel dispensable and one bad quarter away from losing their jobs.
• How a CEO and the marketing leader he nearly fired moved from constant friction to friendship, trust, and autonomy.
• Why repeated marketing turnover is often an alignment problem rather than a hiring problem.
• The four parts of VSET: Vision, Strategy, Execution, and Team.
• How AI makes strategy and CEO-marketer alignment more important, not less.
  

TIMELY TIE-INS

October

• National Book Month and Boss’s Day on October 16
  
  

November

• National Entrepreneurship Month and National Career Development Month
  
  

January

• Annual planning, new budgets, goal setting, and resetting CEO-marketing expectations
  
  

Evergreen

• CMO turnover, workplace burnout, AI disruption, marketing budgets, executive trust, and return on marketing investment