Who has an incentive to tell us AI is coming for marketing jobs?

AI companies.

Fear is imperative to instill when you are selling machines designed to replace expensive human labor. Sam Altman has said AI could handle 95% of work currently done by agencies, strategists and creatives. Zuck says advertisers will eventually need no creative, targeting or measurement. Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman has marketers on his automation list too.

These may be forecasts, but they are also sales pitches.

So we went looking for the crater. And we’ve had our monocle on marketing jobs in the US for more than 2 years now.

This quarter, with Aspen Technology Labs, we analyzed 86,628 full-time, client-side U.S. marketing vacancies. At the end of June, 36,086 jobs were still live, 7.1% more than a year earlier. Director-level and above vacancies were up 17.3%.

The apocalypse is running late or forgot to pack its toothbrush and stayed at home instead.

That does not mean nobody is getting hurt. Agencies are cutting. Creative and production jobs are under pressure. Entry-level hiring fell 4% year over year and 16.4% from Q1. Meanwhile, Product Marketing, Growth Marketing and several other marketing disciplines are healthy.

It doesn’t feel like this for everyone.

A senior product marketer in San Francisco may think the market looks excellent. A communications or creative agency leader in a smaller city may have spent 12 months firing applications into the void.

AI may be contributing to that split. Our data cannot tell us how much.

What it can tell us is that two years into our tracking, the broad collapse in client-side marketing employment predicted by some of AI’s loudest advocates still has not happened. Marketing is standing.

Parts of it are charred.

And this week’s Jobs Edition, down below, shows exactly where employers are still willing to spend serious money.

Our quarterly marketing jobs report is here. Share it with the doomers.

So what kind of jobs? This week’s marketing jobs come with weird baggage: a security clearance, a membership decline and the burden of making New York’s tourism economy feel less extractive. In each case, Marketing has been handed a problem that advertising cannot carry.

We start with a fun one. And a disclaimer. It’s not a proper marketing job but one we couldn’t resist sharing with you.

OpenAI posted a job last week that accidentally tells you everything about how the company sees its own marketing function. They want a “Senior Secure Manufacturing & Stealth Partner” dedicated to Marketing:12-plus years of experience, unimpeachable integrity, deep executive relationships.

In other words - they need a highly paid bodyguard because nobody trusts marketing with the keys.

Read the posting and you’ll notice the role isn’t in Marketing. It’s on Marketing. The Secure Manufacturing & Stealth team “protects OpenAI’s most sensitive product, manufacturing, launch, and partnership work from theft, leakage, espionage, and unauthorized disclosure.” Marketing is the new insider threat. This hire exists because someone decided the marketing department is a gossip with a budget.

The responsibilities are institutional distrust made operational. You will “build trusted relationships across Marketing” = cop language. You will “identify secrecy and information-exposure risks early” = catch (and contain?) them before they blab. You will “embed practical controls into planning, creative production, events, agencies, vendors, media, and executive communications” =  every single thing marketing touches needs a chaperone, codenames, watermarking, password controls, need-to-know access.

They want someone with “direct experience serving as the senior security partner to Marketing, Communications, Public Relations, Events, or another highly visible business function with access to unreleased products.” OpenAI knows exactly what they’re buying here: a function that other functions don’t trust to keep secrets.

Here’s the cruelest line: “influence without authority.” That’s the job. You’re the warden who has to convince the inmates you’re just here to help. No power over the CMO or the creative director, but when they leak the launch, it’s your throat to choke. Be… liked and feared, senior and subordinate, effective and invisible. You’re a $425K marketing bodyguard.

OpenAI’s marketing is everywhere. Its CEO is constantly in public. The brand is inescapable. Much tea has already been spilled. So secrecy isn’t about hiding from the public. It’s about controlling the plumbing. Marketing gets the script, but someone else writes it, stamps it, watermarks it, and watches them read it.

If you take this job, you’re joining the team that thinks marketing is untrustworthy. You’ll sit in the meetings, smile at the creative directors, and quietly catalog who can’t be given the codename.

And if you’re a CMO watching this? OpenAI gave marketing a seat at the table. Then they hired a bodyguard to watch them eat.

If Orange County’s CMO is a banking operator disguised as a marketer, NYC Tourism’s VP is an operating deputy working beneath one.

I lived in New York for 8 years. Long enough to love it, complain about it and become irritated by friends who arrived (mostly from Singapore or England) for 4 days and explained it back to me.

That is tourism’s weird relationship with New York. Visitors consume a version of the city but residents live with the consequences. NYC Tourism + Conventions is hiring a Vice President of Marketing & Media to bring more people into New York while proving that the people already there benefit.

No awareness building required. New York is one of the most famous products in the world, but it’s also a product with 8 million brand managers.  Every resident, restaurateur, hotel owner, Broadway producer, museum director, landlord, cab driver, politician and person who moved to Bushwick 3 months ago has deep conviction on what the city is, who it belongs to and which neighborhood tourists should discover next.

Last year, 65 million people visited. They generated $55.6 billion in direct spending, supported 397,000 jobs and contributed to an overall economic impact of $84.7 billion. Tourism is already one of the city’s largest industries.

But who receives the benefit?

The organization’s mission promises “equitable, sustainable economic prosperity” for residents, businesses and visitors. Those words carry more weight under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose political project is built around making New York more affordable for the people who live there. Tourism wants more hotel nights, restaurant bookings, Broadway seats and convention delegates. Residents want affordable housing, functioning transit that doesn’t smell of wee, businesses they can still use and some assurance that their hood will not become another perpetual backdrop for somebody else’s TikTok.

As the new VP, you have to bring more people into the city without making New Yorkers feel like supporting cast. There is also a national problem.

International visitation to New York fell 3.2% last year, even as total visitor numbers grew. Those travelers count because they account for around half of tourism spending. Across the United States, foreign visitation fell 6% while global tourism spending grew, with anti-immigration policy among the factors pushing travelers toward other destinations.

New York did not vote for Trump. Visitors like my 80yr old Mum still meet his America at immigration. The city can run welcoming advertising in London, Toronto, Paris or Mexico City, but the brand experience begins with visa rules, border questioning and whatever fresh piece of hostility is traveling through the daily news cycle. The VP has no control over any of that and will still be expected to protect New York’s international appeal. Which brings us to the actual job.

This person reports to the CMO and owns integrated marketing, media strategy, campaign development, measurement, agency relationships, budgets and the operating effectiveness of the department.

The JD repeatedly asks for someone who can translate priorities into action, keep managers and directors executing, improve accountability and prepare executive-level materials. It also requires the successful candidate to be “skilled at managing up.”

The confession.

NYC Tourism is looking for a senior deputy who can influence the strategy, run the machinery and make somebody else’s promises survive contact with a smorgasbord of stakeholders.

You will operate with “a high degree of autonomy,” (provided everyone remains aligned) You will own the division’s goals, while the CMO remains the CMO. You will bring strategic input into senior decisions, then make sure the invoices reconcile.

The best deputies add judgment without becoming a rival, challenge decisions without creating theatre and navigate/absorb operational pain.

The salary is $226,525. There is no bonus, commission or relocation support, although they will contribute toward your phone bill. We think you will be on calls a lot.

OpenAI will pay an individual marketing strategist almost $300,000 to decide where B2B demand money should go. NYC Tourism is offering less to help market a city responsible for nearly $85 billion in annual economic impact. Civic work has always relied on the mission discount.

The resources are already squeezed. NYC Tourism asked the city to fund it at $35 million a year. The adopted budget left the organization $11.9 million short of that request. Even after a $5 million increase, it says inflation-adjusted funding has risen by only $2 million over two decades, despite a pandemic and growing competition from other destinations.

So you will be expected to improve performance, increase measurement and keep New York at the front of global destination marketing while making difficult decisions about where limited money goes. President and CEO Julie Coker is leaving for Visit California, with her departure scheduled for August 31. The board has begun searching for her replacement. This VP will arrive beneath a CMO while the ultimate leader is being replaced.

That creates opportunity and a whiff of danger. A new CEO may love the strategy, rewrite it or arrive with their own person in mind to replace you. Ask detailed questions about the search, decision rights and whether the organization expects this role to provide continuity or prepare the ground for change.

New York already has awareness. The VP must decide which visitors the city wants, which boroughs and businesses need more demand, how to distribute the economic benefit and whether campaigns are producing something more useful than impressions of Times Square. They also need to protect the city from its own clichés.

Selling New York through yellow cabs, cheap pizza slices, Broadway marquees and the Statue of Liberty is easy. Persuading people to visit Astoria, spend money in the Bronx, stay longer, return in winter or hold a convention here requires clever media connections planning, stronger partnerships and explainable campaign attribution.

And then they must explain the result to government, the board, member businesses, residents and a CMO who expects them to manage up elegantly. I loved living in New York partly because the city could never agree on what it was. That argument is sort of the brand.

To win at interview - you should not arrive promising to define New York, o, lord no. New Yorkers will consider that an act of aggression.

Show instead how you would bring valuable visitors into all five boroughs, make the industry’s economic contribution visible to residents and run a sophisticated marketing operation through a leadership transition and a constrained budget.

New York is already famous. It needs someone who can make fame pay rent.