Marketing Jobs Over $200K

This edition of CMO Ladder comes to you directly from China’s capital city, Beijing, where, with a marketing lens, there is ample evidence of America’s reputational decline.

The Apple stores we clocked were empty, but Huawei and Oppo stores were full of eager buyers. Tesla dealerships were vacant, and when we did see their cars on the road, they looked dusty, unkempt, and under-specced compared to their Chinese equivalents. Starbucks was hardly staffed at all while Luckin Coffee stores were buzzing. 500m Chinese people use AI apps, which are numerous, are all free, many are single use-case, and no one is using ChatGPT.

While the US President recently posited that “Today, the USA stands as the 'hottest' and most revered country anywhere in the world" and told citizens it’s a golden age for America, that message doesn’t appear to translate in China.

So, while Brand America fights for mindshare overseas, the battle for marketing talent back home is telling its own complex story. Here's what we're seeing…

As of this week, there are 35,014 marketing job openings on the books, up 1.5% from this time last year. The real momentum, though, is happening at the top. Senior-level roles (Director and above) are up 11.8% year-over-year, now accounting for 4,599 positions.

More than half of the job openings (52.4%) include salary details. The median salary for senior marketing roles is $154,752, while across all marketing jobs, the median sits at $84,999.

Median salary by seniority of roles:

• Chief Marketing Officer: $209,997

• SVP/Head of Marketing: $207,906

• VP/Director of Marketing: $165,006

• Marketing Manager: $122,502

• Marketing Specialist: $70,366

Median salary of senior marketing jobs in top hiring cities:

This is one of the sharpest briefs we’ve seen this month so far, and you have to read it like a music executive. On paper, it’s a job at FOX. But it’s not. You’ll be working for Red Seat Ventures (RSV), the "creator economy" engine that FOX acquired back in February.

Think of RSV as a record label for massive media talent.

They find "artists" (creators with huge, loyal tribes like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and the Crime Junkie podcast) and act as their label. RSV builds and runs their entire D2C digital business the subscription "record clubs," the ad sales, the podcast production.

Now, read the job description. RSV is launching a "new premium membership business... blending private club intimacy with digital-first convenience."

This is the real job: RSV has mastered the "record." Now they're hiring you to build the "VIP Tour."

This is a "zero-to-one" build. The existing RSV team is stacked with pros in digital subscriptions and ad ops. They're missing the live and experiential DNA. Your job is to be the GM of this new division, building the "private club" and "curated live experiences" that will become the next high-margin revenue stream. You’re essentially building the velvet rope for the 'anti-elite' elite, a masterclass in monetizing populist rage with a private club price tag.

You’re not finding new fans; you’re selling the $5,000 ticket to the super-fans who already bought the digital subscription (and the red hat).

But there's a catch. This is a "build and defend" mission. That high-performing digital team looks restless to me. You’re likely being hired to be the leader who can stabilize the core team and bridge the scrappy, 5.0-glassdoor-rated startup culture with the friction of the 3.4-rated FOX mothership.

If Taligence had this recruiting assignment, we’d skip the digital marketers. We’d be targeting leaders who have built and scaled premium, fan-centric live events. Our first call would be to Endeavor; specifically, the marketing VPs at On Location (who build Super Bowl VIP packages) or the team that markets UFC's ringside experiences. I assume they’d also be a good ‘culture fit’…. We'd also look at executives from MasterClass (who perfected premium content) or VPs from AEG who build "VIP" programs.

If you’re in the interview loop for this, don't talk about CAC or digital funnels. They have that. Talk about P&Ls for live events. Talk about how you’d build a "meet-and-greet" product. Most importantly, talk about your leadership style and how you’d retain a high-performing team of specialists during a chaotic acquisition. They need a builder, but they need a leader more.

This is the freshest job on our list, and it's a fascinating, two-headed CPG challenge. The modern grocery aisle is a warzone. Private label is eating your lunch on price, and "better-for-you" brands are stealing your soul.

But McCain's real problem? It's climate change. As Global CMO Christine Kalvenes (a 15-year PepsiCo/Frito-Lay lifer) just said, "crop disruption" used to happen every 10 years; "now we have one or more every year." And with the federal government's stance on environmental policy looking... volatile... for the next three years, McCain is clearly betting on themselves, not on a handout from the EPA.

Because of this, Kalvenes has made the entire company pivot to a single, massive, non-negotiable strategy: Regenerative Agriculture. She has already launched the global "Taste Good. Feel Good." platform and the "Regen Fries" product.

This is where you come in. This is not a "come up with a new strategy" job. The strategy is set. Your job is to be the North American execution engine for her exact vision.

Kalvenes's #1 problem, in her own words?

"How do I continue to educate [on regenerative ag] while remaining true to the fact that we’re a lighthearted, fun brand? This is my challenge."

This VP role is being hired to solve that problem. Your "Real Job" is to take a complex, scientific, and frankly boring topic (agronomy) and make it fun enough to sell potatoes.

And you have to do it for two completely different audiences at the same time:

1. B2C: Sell bags of frozen fries to shoppers at Walmart and Kroger.

2. B2B2C: Sell 50lb cases to Foodservice clients (think Sysco) and solve the other problem Kalvenes mentioned: "consumers don’t know that we are your out-of-home fry." This is a classic "Intel Inside" play for spuds, but you're getting hammered on performance. Competitors Lamb Weston and Simplot are winning the delivery war with "Crispy on Delivery" and "40-minute hold time" product claims.

This is not a big delegator job. The JD says you will lead a team of 6. For a VP of all of North America, that's a skeletal crew in our view. You'll be a "player-coach" who is, as the JD says, "rolling up sleeves on pack design or ROI dashboards." – the mythical zoom-in/zoom-out marketing unicorn everyone is trying to hire this year.

If Taligence had this recruiting assignment, we’d be poaching VPs straight from the giants. Kalvenes will likely hire someone who speaks her language. We need a CPG lifer from Kraft Heinz, Conagra, General Mills, or P&G. But they must have also managed a B2B/Foodservice P&L.

If you’re in the interview loop for this, don't pitch a new brand strategy. Pitch a brilliant execution of the existing one. Walk in with a plan to beat Simplot's "Conquest Delivery+" on crispness and hold-time. Show how you'll make "Regen Ag" the #1 tie-breaker for a fast-food chain and a shopper in the freezer aisle. That's how you win.

This is the job with the "tell." The title says "Manager." The salary says "$255,000." That's not a manager job; it's a high-stakes, "solve-our-big-problem" brief.

And the problem isn't just OpenAI – as we talked about the last time we wrote up an Anthropic job back in May. The real war is against Anthropic's own biggest partners: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

I reckon the existential risk here is disintermediation. If every CTO just buys "the LLM in the AWS dropdown menu," from a B2B angle, Claude becomes a faceless, swappable commodity. The partner owns the relationship, and Anthropic just becomes a low-margin "Intel Inside" chip that will never justify its valuation. Their posting of the Partner Marketing Lead role on the same day as this one proves this is their central crisis.

Anthropic knows this. They hired a heavy-hitting Head of Brand (an ex-WhatsApp "cultural movement" builder) in August to run the "air war." This is where you come in. With the air war off to a very respectable start, including a sick MF Doom audio backdrop, the "ground war" is the top priority strategy now.

Your "Real Job" is to build a pull-through strategy. This role is more than telling great stories, you're being hired to build a tribe. Your mandate is to create a community of developers and CTOs so loyal that they demand Claude by name from their cloud providers. If it sounds hard – it is – but this job is their #1 weapon against being commoditized.

If Taligence had this recruiting assignment, we’d be poaching advocacy and community leads from the undisputed masters of this craft. Our first calls would go to Salesforce (the team that built the Trailblazer community), HubSpot (the architects of the Inbound movement), or Figma and Notion (who perfected the art of turning users into fanatics) or Linkedin (who ran an astonishingly good CAB that I loved being a part of and built hard advocacy into my DNA).

If you’re in the interview loop for this, read the room. The JD states they "value highly" the 200-400 word "Why Anthropic?" essay.

They are filtering for ethically-driven builders who believe alignment on mission matters as much as craft. Don't show up with a deck of PDFs you've written. Show up with a 90-day plan to launch their first-ever Customer Advisory Board as a community that not only bypasses the cloud partners but also gives you the user-proof you need. Show that you can be bold AND strategically grounded at the same time, a bit like being the noisiest whisperer in a library.

This is the job that proves our "Brand America" intro. The old-money playbook is dead, and this is Citi's high-stakes, half-million-dollar bet on what's next.

But read the JD. This is not an "Editor-in-Chief" job. That $500k salary isn't for a creative publisher to launch a new Monocle. It's for a technologist to build a global, AI-powered sales enablement engine.

The #1 responsibility listed isn't the external, UHNW-facing brand. It's "Field & Advisor Client Enablement."

Your "Real Job" is to do two things at once:

Build the Internal Machine: Arm thousands of Citi's private bankers with "AI-driven workflows" that can "generate, customize, and distribute compliant, client-ready content at scale." Run the External Brand: Make that machine look and feel like a seamless, exclusive, high-touch media brand for the global UHNW audience.

You're building the engine that lets 5,000 advisors market 1-to-1 to billionaires.

If Taligence had this recruiting assignment, we'd be looking for a very rare hybrid. We need a "B2B-sales-enablement-brain" inside a "luxury-brand-creative-heart." We'd be poaching the in-house tech leads from J.P. Morgan's or Goldman Sachs's private wealth marketing teams. A contrarian pick? The Head of Martech from a company that sells AI-powered, compliant content engines to the banks, like Salesforce or Adobe.

If you’re in the interview loop for this, for God's sake, don't just pitch a "global podcast." That's table stakes. The winning pitch is a tech stack. Walk in with a 90-day plan to build an AI-powered portal that lets an advisor in Singapore create a 100% compliant, hyper-personalized pitch deck in 30 seconds. That's the $500,000 job and if you can pull it off, you’re more than worth it!

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