Marketing Jobs Over $200K

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and right on cue, the marketing job market has taken its usual seasonal dip. This week, there are 33,061 live marketing roles in the U.S., 1,664 fewer than two weeks ago. But compared to this time last year? Practically no change. We're talking a difference of just 15 jobs. Statistically speaking, that’s a rounding error.

But the real story lies a little higher up the org chart. Senior-level roles - Director and above - are defying the slump. There are currently 4,500 such roles open across the U.S. That’s a modest drop of 147 since mid-November, but year over year, we’re looking at a 12.7% increase.

If we set the first week of December 2024 as our baseline at 100, and index the number of senior marketing jobs vs. other levels of roles, an interesting picture emerges:

Senior roles (Director level and above) have been trending upward while the rest of the market has slowed. That divergence has been growing since May, and it’s not something we see every year.

It raises an intriguing question as we prep our 2025 Marketing Jobs Report: what’s driving the surge at this level? Is it economic uncertainty? Political volatility? AI shaking up the org structure? Or something else? And are we seeing a repeat of “numbers might be good, but I’m not feeling it” that reflected how many Americans have felt about the economy over the last couple of years.

We’d love to hear your perspective. If you’ve got thoughts, please share by replying to this email (yes, it comes straight back to my inbox), and if you’re open to being quoted in our report or future newsletters, please include your name, title, and company.

On the bright side, salary transparency is still on the up. This week, 55% of marketing job listings included pay details - always nice to know what the deal is before the third interview. For senior marketers, the median salary clocks in at a healthy $154,003. Across all levels, the midpoint sits at $87,485. Not too shabby, but clearly, climbing the ladder still pays dividends.

Median Salary by Seniority of Jobs

• Chief Marketing Officer: $260,000

• SVP/Head of Marketing: $200,002

• VP/Director of Marketing: $165,006

• Marketing Manager: $121,181

• Marketing Specialist: $70,002

Median Salary in Top Hiring Cities

This week, we cover a $400K mandate to sell AI at Anthropic alongside a job demanding R and Python expertise at Peloton, but only if your un-assisted voice can survive the Human Authenticity Firewall.

When it comes to using AI in job applications, the market demands that you either master the machine or prove your independence from it... There is no middle ground.

Since October, Anthropic has sped up hiring again in the marketing department.

The company now needs a $400K human who can sell Claude without sounding like a chatbot wrote the pitch.

The reality is that Claude is still a research darling… your job is to bolt a cash register to its forehead and ship enterprise-grade receipts to London, Frankfurt, and every JP Morgan tower that still views generative AI as a compliance grenade. Turn "helpful, honest, harmless" into a CFO beach-house line item.

This mandate is easy to divine here: Own the global solutions roadmap, drive EMEA  expansion, and connect solutions directly to the pipeline via compelling customer proofs. You must translate complex technical capabilities, like Claude's expertise in agentic tasks and coding, into enterprise value for CISOs and banks.

The Anthropic policy on AI use in hiring is by far the most sophisticated I’ve spotted and takes up a whole page of internet. The company mandates a strict Human-in-the-Loop workflow: use Claude to polish slides, research, and refine drafts, but live ideation and assessments are all you. They call it collaboration; we call it prove apex predator status post-LLM!

The offer will go to the Stripe PMM who convinced risk-averse banks to hand payment rails to an API, the Bedrock marketer who translated embeddings into eight-figure renewals, or the Notion solutions lead who sold leak-proof collab to boards.

The final filter is absolute: Ditch the "paradigm shift" throat-clearing. Hit the CFO with measurable proof: "Claude shrank KYC review from 40 hours to 4. You're welcome." If you can’t nail that pitch without Claude holding your hand, you’re already redundant.

Peloton is searching for a rare beast: a Truth Architect who can stabilize a wobbly subscription business under constant financial, product, and executive pressure. This is a foundational mandate to clean up data, harden measurement, and make the new leadership’s bets provable in CFO language.

Reporting into a still-new power pairing, CMO Megan Imbres on performance and creative, and CTO Francis Shanahan on AI and product innovation… this role exists to build the measurement spine that holds their shared strategy together. The remit is to own the global learning agenda, stand up rigorous Marketing Mix Modeling, and design an experimentation roadmap that can survive board-level scrutiny.

Ambitious, much? Yes. In my lived reality, the person who codes at depth and the person who persuades a boardroom are usually two different hires. Here, the brief expects both: deep analytics chops (R, Python, experimental design) and an executive voice that can turn incrementality studies, MMM outputs, and funnel diagnostics into decisions on subscriber LTV:CAC, payback windows, and capital allocation.

The technical frontier is privacy-safe, AI-augmented measurement: clean rooms, modeled conversions, and emerging AI-driven decision systems that sit between media, product, and finance. The leader in this seat will be asked to turn those tools into an operational discipline, and to tie media and product performance directly to churn, LTV, and contribution margin.

And then there’s the twist: Peloton is explicitly banning AI tools during the interview process. For a role built to command AI-powered measurement, they are drawing a hard Human Authenticity Firewall around the selection moment.

The message is clear: they want a leader whose core thinking, judgment, and communication show-up un-augmented and unmistakably human. It is principled, slightly paranoid, and very on‑trend.

Around this role, the marketing org is being rebuilt with talent from high-velocity media agencies (including WPP Media, Initiative, DEPT®, R/GA) and high-bar brand shops (Nike, TIDAL). Your job is to impose measurement discipline on a creatively ambitious, performance-hungry team accustomed to speed, craft, and storytelling.

If Taligence were running this search, the brief would start with the Architects of Subscription Economics: leaders at Spotify, Netflix, Audible, or similar who live and die by churn curves, engagement cohorts, and LTV models across markets. It would also tap data and measurement talent from platform ecosystems like Apple Services and Amazon Advertising, where people have already wrestled with the collision of hardware, services, and recurring revenue. Sunny, if you’re reading this - this one has your name all over it 🙂 

For candidates, the playbook is simple: reject the synthetic voice here. Don’t walk in with “it’s not just about measurement, it’s about insights” wallpaper.

Arrive with a crisp global learning agenda that identifies the three biggest unknowns driving subscriber LTV. Show the sequence: how you’d use geo-based testing, incrementality experiments, and MMM to reallocate spend, shut down underperforming channels or martech, and double down where the unit economics are actually working. That’s how you win this title, and Peloton's controlled turnaround demands it.

This one is not strictly a marketing job - it's a P&L-owning executive position within ICF Next.

It’s a witness protection program for senior agency lifers who are tired of the chaos and M&A fallout and want a route to Consulting. ICF, born in 1969 as a VC fund for minority-owned Federal contractors, wants a Managing Partner to run a 200-person profit center inside the Beltway. Translation: you own the P&L, the pipeline, and the panic attacks. Your client? The U.S. government. Your narratives are so bulletproof they survive sweat-inducing congressional hearings. The work has real consequences though… ICF’s history includes contributing to the creation of the Superfund.

And then there’s the twist: The explicit ban on AI tools during the entire application and interview process. This Human Authenticity Firewall confirms that for a role priced up to nearly $450K where trust and integrity are the core currency… they are demanding proof that your real voice is the source of your strategy.

If Taligence ran this mandate, we would bypass traditional marketing leaders and hunt for  Agency Leaders who really ran the shop, whispered to the clients and inspired the people.

We’d target the Accenture Partner who sold the work, the Edelman MD who knows Federal procurement is a blood sport disguised as paperwork, or perhaps the Lockheed comms exec who can translate “classified” into “congressional appropriation”.

Agency refugees: bring your P&L scars,, government rolodex, US ID, and your human voice. This is real money, for real stakes, with real consequences. Apply like a human, or don’t.

DISQO, which aims to be the "world's most trusted ad measurement platform," explicitly mandates that this Head of Marketing be a visionary who can lead the integration of AI tools across all marketing operations.

Visionary AI integration at Head level? Ambitious scope 😅 

This is a pressure cooker because the CEO is also acting as the Chief Growth Officer (CGO), and despite the mission, the marketing team has had high attrition (est.) 30% on this team (vs. ~17% company-wide per LinkedIn data and industry avg.

You will report to a founder whose singular focus is top-line growth, owning the entire GTM engine across brand strategy, demand generation, product marketing, and content.

However, take comfort in what appears to be a very decent work culture. The company boasts a high 4.1-star rating on Glassdoor, with 74% of employees recommending it to a friend. This indicates that while the pace is intense, the underlying environment is positive. This internal loyalty and positive sentiment are powerful tools for the new Head of Marketing, who needs to stabilize the team while fiercely fighting the talent war against competitors like Kantar and Toluna, which are poaching team members.

In terms of AI in hiring, this company rejects the Human Authenticity Firewall seen elsewhere in today’s coverage. DISQO explicitly states it may use AI tools to support parts of the hiring process, embracing technology from the top down. One should assume they have no objection to you juicing your Gemini subscription for all its worth to help with your 90-day plan and final presentation.

If Taligence ran this brief (to solve for a company promising to solve the hardest and oldest problem in marketing), we would hunt for leaders who have successfully executed AI-enabled marketing transformation in the tech world. We'd target AdTech/MarTech Maestros from platforms that live and die by identity-based measurement, such as Innovid, TTD, Merkle, Axciom.

If you’re in the loop for this one, do not hide your AI usage. Show concrete examples of how you have worked in the past with founders. Given the dual CEO/CGO role and relatively high attrition, your pitch should focus on team harmony and accelerated pipeline growth.

Here are a few more jobs that are worth a proper look. With a premium subscription, you’ll unlock a list of America’s top-paying marketing roles, refreshed with new postings from the last 30 days.

Hey, one last thing before I go. A small THANKS! I know some of you out there share this newsletter in your dark web networks, your Whatsapp and WeChat groups. KEEP DOING IT!! 

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