Whatever else may be happening in the wider world, the U.S. marketing job market is continuing its steady pace.

This week, there are 39,572 marketing roles live across the U.S., which is 1,200 more than we reported two weeks ago. Compared with the same week last year, that’s a 5.9% increase. It’s also worth noting that this point last year marked the start of a cooling period for marketing hiring, which continued until the market reached its low in August.

At the senior end, the picture looks particularly solid. 5,152 roles are at director level or above, which we classify as senior marketing positions. That represents a 16.7% year-on-year increase.

Hang on a second. If marketing jobs were truly facing the "job-eating maw of technology" that Martin Ford warned of in his 2015 book Rise of the Robots, or the near-total obsolescence OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted for the marketing field, this is a curious way for an industry to die. The reality appears more stubborn: organizations are investing in senior marketing leadership at a faster clip than the overall market, not retreating from it. Something to think about.

Transparency around pay continues to improve as well. Around 60% of job postings now include salary information. Across all marketing roles, the median salary sits at $90,002, while senior marketing positions have a median salary of $154,991.

Median salary by seniority of jobs:

Median salary in the top hiring cities:

This week features a tension between the plumbing and the poetry. At IDC, Vantage, and The Trade Desk, we see the rise of demand for leaders building the physical and digital foundations of the AI era.

But at Citi, the mandate is different. It is a $500k defensive play for creative consolidation of a fragmented brand to sell status in a world where the bots are making banking itself more frictionless (hopefully!).

If you're job-active or job-curious, know which front you are on. In 2026, you are either building the platform the bots cannot live without, or you are working to ensure the human still cares enough to look at the screen.

(legal disclaimer)

IDC is currently in a high-stakes pivot to avoid becoming just another legacy data shop. While rival Gartner’s stock was cut in half in 2025 due to AI disruption and slowing renewals, IDC is betting on its quantitative data moat as an "AI-proof" alternative.

Blackstone, which acquired IDG in 2021, has spent the last year performing strategic housekeeping - divesting the Foundry media arm to Regent to turn IDC into a pure-play, high-margin data engine. This role is reconstruction. The last group CMO, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, was a brand evangelist tasked with cross-selling IDC and Foundry. In the new IDC-only structure, that model is dead. IDC now needs a “CMO-1” builder to lead a transformation from selling PDFs to owning the "corpus" of the tech intelligence layer.

The irony of the JD is the demand for "proven results" in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) - a field so new it’s a moving target, that no one has truly cracked yet. If you win the seat, your mission is to ensure IDC intelligence is the primary citation for AI agents because if a CTO asks a chatbot for market data and IDC isn't the answer, the brand is invisible.

Historically, analyst firms ran on institutional habit, but you must now reposition the product category from research to intelligence infrastructure, turning reports into machine-readable datasets that AI systems query directly. Making IDC’s intelligence feel live and embedded in workflows. As the last CMO Michelle noted in a recent interview: "AI has stopped feeling like a tool and started functioning more like a teammate".

If Taligence had this search, we’d skip traditional analyst-firm marketers. We’d poach from the data platform giants like Snowflake, Datadog, or Bloomberg where leaders already treat proprietary datasets as decision infrastructure. We want the corpus thinkers over the paint experts; those who understand that in an AI-mediated world, owning the underlying signals of reality beats owning the narrative.

The fact that they aren't using a SHREK search firm suggests they are either using this public ad as a market signal to broadcast their "AI-first" reinvention to their own customers, or they’ve realized that the playbook for this role probably doesn't exist within the traditional executive search circles.

To win this interview: Ditch the Fluff: The JD explicitly flags a "low tolerance for generic corporate messaging". Show up with a technical blueprint for a multi-LLM marketing architecture. Don't claim you've solved for LLM discovery. Pitch a vision where you translate complex causal measurements into actionable strategies that ensure IDC becomes the machine-readable "source of truth" in AI training data. Ask about the "Exit": Given Blackstone’s recent divestments, ask CEO Lorenzo Larini whether this mandate is about prepping for a public offering in a sector where traditional multiples have collapsed to the low teens.

Data centers have spent 20 years evolving from boring, invisible "internet plumbing" into the geopolitical equivalent of LNG terminals. We have moved past the Cloud and Streaming eras into the AI Inflection, where compute power and gigawatt-scale energy are the ultimate constraints on human progress. Vantage is a "Neutral Factory Builder" for the AI era, constructing nation-scale infrastructure like the $25B, 1.4-gigawatt campus in Texas and the $15B Wisconsin campus tied to the Stargate supercomputer initiative. This shift from "warehouse" to "strategic asset" is exactly why they are hunting for their first true global marketing chief.

This is a "Day 1" structural build. Historically, marketing at Vantage was bundled under commercial leadership or buried within executive portfolios. This new SVP role marks the first time marketing is being centralized at the top table to own the global brand, narrative, and GTM strategy. It’s their first true storytelling engine.

It is an infrastructure-finance mandate disguised as marketing. Vantage is controlled by a board of Digital Infrastructure PE giants like DigitalBridge and sovereign wealth funds like PSP Investments—operators who care about triple-net lease velocity, not "brand purpose." As SVP, you are the conductor of a high-velocity matrix, overseeing a centralized "internal agency" and three powerful regional business partners across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Beyond the sales floor, your strategy must now take on a heavy Public Affairs edge: selling 1.4GW projects to skeptical local municipalities and utility boards who view data centers as an energy drain rather than a community benefit.

If Taligence were running this search, we would ignore the traditional SaaS CMO pool entirely. This role requires an "Infrastructure Architect" who has marketed scarcity in capital-intensive, high-stakes environments. We’d raid the leadership ranks of Logistics giants (ProLogis), Renewable Energy (NextEra), Aerospace (Blue Origin, RocketLab) or Defense Logistics (Anduril). All places where leaders understand how to sell reliability and availability to technical buyers on a global stage. The winning candidate will be a diplomatic hatchet who can centralize a global budget without alienating regional GTM leads who are fighting for power-grid relevance in Singapore or Dublin.

To win this interview, we suggest you market the Inventory, not the Image: The board seeks an operator who understands the industrial-scale real estate model. Show them a marketing dashboard that mirrors operational telemetry…if you don't know the exact power-ready date of a hall in Johor, you can't sell it.

Show you can navigate the ‘Single-Customer’ Risk: With projects like Stargate, Vantage faces the risk of being viewed as a Microsoft "captive." Demonstrate how you will diversify the brand to remain the preferred neutral factory floor for the entire hyperscale ecosystem.

Finally, manage the geopolitical narrative: Governments are now talking about “sovereign AI.” Show how you will influence regulators and secure limited grid capacity.

The Trade Desk (TTD) is currently fighting a two-front war for the soul of the open internet. On one side, the stock has been hammered…down 63% in twelve months…as growth slowed and Amazon’s DSP finally weaponized its first-party shopper data to raid TTD’s territory by offering agencies free head-to-head tests. On the other, CEO Jeff Green just staged a massive $150M conviction buy of his own stock, signaling a middle finger to the Wall Street bear thesis that SaaS is dead (or at least, wounded). This is the backdrop for the General Manager of PR: a high-stakes, blood-in-the-streets moment where the narrative is a most virtuous focus. It’s a defining moment for the open web.

This is a Wartime Press Secretary seat. Your primary mission is to institutionalize TTD as the "Bloomberg Terminal" of the open internet before walled gardens like Google and Amazon attempt to verticalize the entire ecosystem. Jeff Green has already declared war on the programmatic trade press, calling Adweek a "National Enquirer" for ad tech that prioritizes controversy over truth. As GM of PR, you are managing a media insurgency. You must bypass hostile trade outlets to speak directly to CMOs and regulators, reframing TTD not as a "buying tool," but as the objective, neutral infrastructure necessary for the AI Inflection.

If Taligence had this search, we’d look for a high-velocity B2B PR agency veteran—someone from the leadership ranks of SHIFT Communications, Walker Sands, or LaunchSquad. We would also look at PR leaders from Upwork and Fiverr. We want the ‘Performance Communications’ expert who has spent twenty years earning visibility for disruptors by newsjacking and turning complex data into sustained industry SOV. We need a leader who treats PR as a growth engine and understands that in an AI-mediated world, earning a spot in the "answer engine" layer through Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to win back buyer intent.

Jeff is betting that search is fragmenting into Chatbots and Sponsored Shopping. Pitch a PR strategy that positions TTD as the only objective monetization engine for new AI surfaces like ChatGPT. To win this seat, Attack the Conflict. Lean into Jeff’s "objectivity" crusade. Explain how you will weaponize the channel conflict inherent in Amazon and Google’s models (they own the store and the scoreboard) to make TTD the only logical choice for the Fortune 500.

Finally, prove you have the stomach for "issues communications" during multiple compression. Pitch a "Reliability" narrative that shows how TTD’s UID2 and Kokai platforms deliver a major lift in revenue even when the broader market is volatile.

While the rest of the tech world is obsessed with “The Corpus,” Citi is staging a massive, half-million-dollar defensive play for “The Paint.” After years of fragmented marketing across proprietary branded cards and retail partnerships, Citi is consolidating. This is a “C16” level role…Citi’s internal code for “Heavyweight Executive,” and it signals a total brand reconstruction of the U.S. Consumer Cards business. In an era where fintechs are eating market share with slicker UIs and AI-driven personalization, Citi is finally trying to unify its “high-tech, high-touch” promise under one creative czar.

This job? It is an integration and governance nightmare. You are being hired to merge the scrappy, product-specific visual identities of various card segments into the monolithic Citi enterprise brand. You will oversee Skyline, Citi’s massive internal creative agency, while orchestrating high-stakes 360 launches for product refreshes in a hyper-competitive lending market. The JD explicitly calls for an “aggressive north star vision”—meaning the board is tired of boring, bank-generic creative and wants a leader who can deliver breakthrough storytelling that actually moves the needle on acquisition metrics. And naturally, you’re expected to be the AI efficiency pioneer, tasked with using generative AI to slash production costs and speed up the delivery of a best-in-class client experience.

If Taligence were raiding for this seat, we’d ignore the traditional retail bank marketers. We want the lifestyle and luxury architects. We’d go after the creative leads at Sofi, Ogilvy, BBDO or even Marriott Bonvoy…people who understand that a credit card should be a status symbol and an access product. We need a proper, proven strategic visionary who has survived a massive brand transformation at scale and has the confidence to tell a room full of Compliance and Legal officers why a bold creative risk is worth the regulatory headache.

If you land an interview, don’t just show a portfolio of ads. Show a process for how you’ve led large-scale product launches across a matrixed organization without losing the creative soul of the campaign. Go mystery shopping. (Full disclosure: I dropped Citi like a lead balloon after a painful decade as a customer.)

The JD specifically highlights being at the forefront of AI. Don’t just say you use Midjourney. Pitch a vision for how you will use AI to automate the boring creative work, freeing up your human team to focus on the high-level emotional storytelling that bots can’t replicate. Show how you’ll get the speed and keep the soul.

Whilst we are on the topic of speed, we feel duty-bound to call out certain employers who feel that it’s okay to let job listings linger, like ghosts, for a very, very long time. You can make up your own mind: Are these poor talent-management practices that frustrate job seekers? Do they indicate a lack of care…or conviction?

Who is on the naughty step this week?

Do better, people! 

A few more, much fresher roles caught our eye this week - well worth a look: