On this week’s episode of Marketing Vanguard, host Jenny Rooney sits down with Llibert Argerich, chief marketing officer at Thumbtack, a nationwide two-sided marketplace connecting homeowners with vetted service professionals.
They discuss rewriting the narrative of the marketing function — from cost center to profit driver. Tune in to explore ROI-driven strategies that marketers can and must use, why local market strategy outperforms national campaigns for fragmented industries, and how AI is transforming customer-to-pro matching at scale.
Backed by rich experience, Llibert offers actionable frameworks for driving measurable growth without breaking the bank.
If you’re looking to do more with less and transform your marketing team into a business enabler, this conversation is for you.
With two decades of expertise in digital marketing, performance optimization and marketplace dynamics, having held pivotal roles at industry leaders like Expedia and eBay, Llibert has established himself as a data-driven strategist.
Most recently, he led consumer marketing at Udemy, scaling the platform from $250 million to nearly $700 million in revenue over five years.
Episode highlights:
[00:01] Reframe Marketing as a Profit Center, Not a Cost Center — Llibert fundamentally challenges the traditional view of marketing budgets by positioning marketing as a profit center directly tied to bottom-line contribution rather than a departmental expense. This paradigm shift is critical for CMOs seeking to build credibility and sustainable budget allocation within their organizations. Many CMOs struggle with justifying large brand investments without clear ROI metrics, which erodes trust with finance teams and leadership. The key to implementing this strategy is to make every marketing dollar measurable and connected to the P&L, ensuring that budget increases are earned through demonstrated value, not requested as entitlements.
[07:37] Constraint-Driven Innovation Is a Competitive Advantage — Llibert articulates that resource scarcity in startup environments is not a limitation to overcome, but a forcing function that drives ruthless prioritization and creative problem-solving, ultimately producing better marketing outcomes than teams with unlimited budgets. This mindset flip is transformative for CMOs managing under budget pressure, as it reframes constraints as a feature, not a bug, of high-performance marketing organizations. Many CMOs respond to budget limitations by doing less of everything, when the real opportunity is to do fewer things with greater intentionality, testing, and optimization. The key step is to establish a hypothesis-driven testing methodology where every campaign or channel investment is treated as an experiment with defined success metrics, allowing teams to fail fast and scale what works without wasting capital.
[13:41] Solving Hyper-Local Market Complexity — Thumbtack’s core differentiation lies not in being a directory of service providers, but in being a matching service that understands both the homeowner and the pro deeply, then connects them at the exact moment of need. This insight applies broadly to any fragmented, hyper-local marketplace where national messaging misses the critical reality that customers care most about local availability and relevance. Many marketers waste resources on broad national campaigns that fail to address the zip-code-level intensity of competition and customer need in localized markets. To apply this strategy effectively, CMOs should shift budget allocation from national reach campaigns to local-market depth initiatives that test brand investment hypotheses city-by-city before scaling.
