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Advertising and promotions managers

Also called Advertising manager, Promotions manager, Media director, Director of advertising, VP of advertising

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 21,470 US advertising and promotions managers, with median pay of $133,660 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 71,100, in May 2003. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 15,000 from 1910, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for advertising and promotions managers: Programmatic advertising + real-time bidding, 2009 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 3.7% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Advertising and promotions managers: jobs and pay since 1910 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2011

Chicago

Future History. "Advertising and promotions managers: jobs and pay since 1910." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2011.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_2011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Advertising and promotions managers: jobs and pay since 1910}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Advertising Agent / Advertising Solicitor (space-broker era)
Known then as Advertising Manager (in-house corporation or full-service agency)
Known then as Advertising Manager / Account Executive / Ad Director (television era)
Known then as Advertising Manager / Director of Advertising / Media Director
Known then as Advertising and Promotions Manager / Digital Advertising Manager / Paid Media Director
Known then as Advertising and Promotions Managers (BLS SOC 11-2011)
Known today as Advertising and Promotions Managers (BLS SOC 11-2011)
Projected to still be called Advertising and Promotions Managers (BLS SOC 11-2011)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
21K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$133,660
Est.

≈ $130,233 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1869

Francis Wayland Ayer, age twenty-one, founds N.W. Ayer and Son in Philadelphia. Named for his father (the "and Son" is a marketing choice, the father was not in the business), the agency pioneered the open contract model in 1875: advertising for a fixed commission on actual space cost rather than a markup on the discounted rate. This transparency was a professional landmark. The Ayer agency became the first to offer clients full-service planning, creation, and placement as an integrated professional service rather than pure space brokerage.

Beat · 1904

In 1904, copywriter John E. Kennedy walks into Lord and Thomas in Chicago to find Albert Lasker and tells him that advertising is "salesmanship in print." Lasker, who had been searching for a definition of what the profession was actually doing, is converted on the spot. The "reason why" doctrine that follows, every ad must give the reader a specific, logical reason to buy, dominates American advertising thinking for the next three decades. Lasker buys out Lord and Thomas in 1910 at age thirty and builds it into one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.

Beat · 1910

June 24, 1910: Forty-five companies gather in Detroit to found the Association of National Advertising Managers. The original name is significant, the organization is explicitly for advertising managers, not advertisers or agencies, recognizing advertising management as a distinct professional function requiring its own association. In 1914 the name is changed to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which endures to the present. The ANA becomes the leading US advertiser trade association, eventually representing over 1,000 companies that collectively control about $400 billion in annual marketing expenditure.

Beat · 1959

Doyle Dane Bernbach creates the "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen Beetle, widely recognized as the most influential American advertisement of the 20th century. The campaign, art directed by Helmut Krone and written by Julian Koenig, inverts every convention of automotive advertising: where Detroit ran full-page beauty shots of large, chrome-laden cars with aspirational lifestyle copy, the Beetle ads featured a tiny car on a white page with honest, self-deprecating text. The campaign marks the beginning of the 1960s Creative Revolution that redefined what advertising managers should aspire to, and shifted the profession's axis from rational persuasion toward emotional and cultural resonance.

Beat · 1994

October 1994: HotWired (the online arm of Wired magazine) sells the first banner advertisement in internet history to AT&T, part of AT&T's "You Will" campaign. The initial click-through rate is 44%, an extraordinary figure by any subsequent standard, driven largely by novelty. AT&T pays $30,000 for a three-month placement. Internet advertising grows quickly through the late 1990s before the dot-com crash wipes out many of the early entrants. The AT&T banner marks the moment advertising management begins its long migration from placement of static media toward interactive, measurable, and eventually algorithmic channels.

Beat · 2009

The first real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchanges launch in 2009, built on Google's DoubleClick infrastructure. RTB means that instead of buying ad inventory in advance from publishers, advertisers bid for individual impressions in 100-millisecond auctions as each user loads a page. The first demand-side platforms (DSPs) emerge the same year. By 2013 programmatic accounts for more than half of all US digital display advertising. For advertising managers, this is the single most disruptive structural shift since television: the craft of media planning moves from human judgment to algorithmic optimization, and a technology skill stack that did not exist in 2008 becomes a core job requirement by 2015.

Beat · 2023

The FTC revises its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising in June 2023, significantly expanding disclosure requirements for AI-generated content, influencer posts, and native advertising. The revision makes explicit what had been implied: advertising managers are personally accountable for ensuring that AI-generated creative carries appropriate disclosures, that influencer partnerships are clearly flagged, and that sponsored content in any form meets the "clear and conspicuous" standard. As AI tools generate more advertising content autonomously, the advertising manager's regulatory accountability function has become more important, not less, a genuine human moat even as execution is automated.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace advertising and promotions managers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
-3.7%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-2011 (Advertising and promotions managers): 33.2 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 31.9 thousand in 2035, a change of -1.2 thousand (-3.7%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (35.1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
54.7%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-2011.00 Advertising and Promotions Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.547, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.256 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.837; GPT-4-rated β 0.477. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for advertising and promotions managers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGovern AI-driven programmatic media budgets, setting total investment levels and channel allocation thresholds for Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ campaigns, defining brand safety exclusion lists (content categories, competitor adjacency, placement exclusions), reviewing AI-generated performance summaries, and authorizing budget reallocations above the preset AI-automation threshold.

Govern AI-driven programmatic media budgets, setting total investment levels and channel allocation thresholds for Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ campaigns, defining brand safety exclusion lists (content categories, competitor adjacency, placement exclusions), reviewing AI-generated performance summaries, and authorizing budget reallocations above the preset AI-automation threshold.[5],[6],[7],[2]

Where your edge is

AI now executes almost all of the tactical media buying that historically defined this role. Your leverage is upstream: the budget authorization level, brand safety policy, and channel strategy that determine what AI is optimizing toward. Build expertise in reading AI performance summaries critically, understanding when an algorithm is chasing short-term CTR at the expense of brand equity is a judgment only you can exercise.

AI is sitting alongside you hereArchitect and govern autonomous AI campaign management, defining the strategic objectives, budget guardrails, creative asset libraries, and brand safety rules that Albert AI or Smartly.io operate within

Architect and govern autonomous AI campaign management, defining the strategic objectives, budget guardrails, creative asset libraries, and brand safety rules that Albert AI or Smartly.io operate within; reviewing AI-generated performance reports and weekly budget pacing summaries; making strategic reallocation decisions when AI performance signals diverge from business objectives; onboarding new channels and campaign types into the autonomous management framework.[10],[11],[12]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Autonomous AI campaign managers are real and deployed. The advertising manager who can architect the strategy and constraints an autonomous system operates within, and interpret when its optimization decisions are tactically correct but strategically wrong, is the role that survives. Learn the inputs that govern autonomous systems: budget floors and ceilings, brand safety policies, creative refresh triggers, and the business-outcome definitions that translate into algorithm objective functions.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOversee AI-powered ad copy optimization, briefing Persado or Phrasee with campaign objectives, regulatory guardrails (FTC-compliant language, category restrictions), and brand voice constraints

Oversee AI-powered ad copy optimization, briefing Persado or Phrasee with campaign objectives, regulatory guardrails (FTC-compliant language, category restrictions), and brand voice constraints; reviewing statistically significant winning language variants across email subjects, display headlines, and CTAs; translating performance signals (which emotional triggers drive conversion for your audience) into updated messaging frameworks and agency briefing templates.[9],[13],[14]

Where your edge is

Your role shifts upstream (setting the objective function, brand safety constraints, and regulatory boundaries) and downstream (interpreting what winning language reveals about audience psychology and updating the briefing strategy). Build an internal library of winning language patterns: this institutional memory is the compound return on AI copy optimization.

Where advertising and promotions managers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Marketing Managers

Advertising and Promotions Managers already own the paid media and creative production channels that sit inside the broader Marketing Manager remit. The pivot works best for advertising managers at companies where the role can naturally expand, adding ownership of SEO, content marketing, CRM, or product marketing to a portfolio that currently focuses only on paid media and campaigns. The primary skill gaps are brand strategy development (Marketing Managers own the brand positioning brief, not just the execution), customer insight research ownership, and cross-functional stakeholder management at a broader organizational scope.

What you'd add
  • · Brand strategy and positioning methodology (Jobs-to-Be-Done, Brand Ladder frameworks)
  • · Content and SEO strategy: editorial planning, keyword architecture, organic channel ownership
  • · CRM and lifecycle marketing: segmentation strategy in HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud
  • · Cross-functional stakeholder management: product, sales, finance alignment at VP/C-suite level
  • · Customer insight synthesis: commissioning and interpreting market research, survey design
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of advertising and promotions managers changed since 1869?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Print media placement + hand-typeset copy (newspaper and magazine era)

    The founding tool era for advertising management was the newspaper and magazine. N.W. Ayer and Son pioneered the full-service model in 1869, doing everything from writing copy to placing it in publications across the country. The advertising manager's craft in this era was spatial and relational: knowing which publications reached which audiences, negotiating rates with publishers, and preparing or reviewing hand-typeset advertisements. There were no media metrics beyond circulation figures, no reach-and-frequency modeling, and no attribution beyond asking customers where they heard about a product. The craft was a combination of salesmanship, editorial instinct, and geographic knowledge.

  • Radio advertising + the "reason why" copywriting doctrine (Kennedy, Lasker, Hopkins)

    Radio changed advertising management fundamentally by introducing time rather than space as the resource being bought. WEAF in New York ran the first sponsored radio program in 1922; by the late 1920s, soap companies (Procter and Gamble, Lever Brothers) were sponsoring entire daytime drama serials to reach housewives. The advertising manager now had to think in terms of programming, scheduling, and audience timing, not just page placement. Simultaneously, the "reason why" intellectual framework pioneered by John E. Kennedy and Albert Lasker at Lord and Thomas from 1904 onward gave advertising management a strategic vocabulary: advertising was "salesmanship in print" (and, by extension, on air), and the advertising manager's job was to give the audience a specific, compelling reason to buy.

    Effect on the work

    Radio advertising expanded the total advertising economy and the headcount of professionals managing it. Procter and Gamble's strategy of sponsoring radio programs at scale made in-house advertising management departments a significant employer at major consumer goods companies.

  • Television advertising + the Creative Revolution (BBDO, Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, DDB)

    Television was the advertising manager's most powerful tool and most demanding challenge. By 1955, a large share of American households had a television set. The advertising manager now had to govern production budgets for filmed commercials, negotiate network and spot television buys, and manage the creative talent, directors, actors, music composers, that television demanded. The Creative Revolution of the 1960s (exemplified by Doyle Dane Bernbach's "Think Small" Volkswagen campaign of 1959 and David Ogilvy's methodical brand-building approach) elevated the advertising manager's role to that of a strategic business partner who could move product and build brands through the emotional power of the medium.

    Effect on the work

    Television drove the largest sustained expansion of advertising management employment in US history. Madison Avenue agencies grew from small partnerships to large professional organizations with hundreds of employees; major consumer goods companies built in-house advertising departments of many people. The 1950s and 1960s represented peak prestige and headcount growth for the occupation.

  • Cable television, direct mail, and media fragmentation (Nielsen ratings, media planning software)

    The launch of cable television (HBO, CNN, MTV, ESPN) fragmented the broadcast audience that had made network television buying straightforward. An advertising manager in 1980 could reach a sizeable share of American households with a single prime-time network buy; by 1990, the same reach required planning buys across many channels. Media planning software emerged to handle the reach-and-frequency calculations that had previously been done by hand. Direct mail became a major channel for retailers and financial services, adding database management to the advertising manager's toolkit. The era demanded more analytical skill and less pure creative judgment than the television golden age.

  • Internet advertising + banner ads + search advertising (HotWired 1994, Google AdWords 2000)

    HotWired sold the first banner advertisement in October 1994 to AT&T ($30,000 for a three-month placement), and by 1995 internet advertising was an emerging budget line. Google AdWords launched in October 2000 and introduced the pay-per-click model that fundamentally changed how advertising managers thought about accountability: for the first time, every click was trackable. The advertising manager who had previously reported campaign results in terms of estimated reach and frequency now faced clients and executives demanding cost-per-acquisition and return on ad spend. The dot-com crash of 2001 wiped out a large portion of early internet advertising budgets, but the Google-dominated search advertising model that survived the crash rebuilt into the dominant digital advertising channel of the 2000s.

    Effect on the work

    The internet advertising era created a new category of specialist (digital advertising manager) while initially leaving traditional advertising management relatively intact. It was the combination of digital and programmatic that would eventually compress headcount.

  • Programmatic advertising + real-time bidding (DSPs, RTB, Facebook Ads 2007)

    The first real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges launched in 2009, built on Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange. By 2013, programmatic buying accounted for more than half of all US digital display ad expenditure. Facebook Ads, launched in 2007, had by 2010 become a major platform that shifted budgets away from traditional agencies toward self-serve digital buying. The advertising manager's role shifted dramatically: routine media placement decisions, which publisher, which audience segment, which bid price, moved from human planners to algorithms. The advertising manager became a platform governor: setting budget parameters and optimization objectives, then reviewing machine-generated results. This structural shift drove the first significant headcount contraction in the profession: teams that had required five media planners could now be managed by one advertising manager with access to the right platforms.

    Effect on the work

    The number of people working in marketing and advertising fell 14% between 2019 and 2022 (UK data, Marketing Week, 2023), a trend consistent with US patterns. Programmatic automation eliminated entire layers of junior and mid-level media planning work, compressing the advertising management hierarchy.

  • Autonomous AI campaign management (Google Performance Max 2021, Meta Advantage+, Albert AI, Adobe GenStudio)

    Google Performance Max (launched 2021, major AI expansions 2023-2025) and Meta Advantage+ use generative AI to automatically assemble creative, select audiences, set bids, and allocate impressions across all inventory surfaces from a single budget input. Albert AI, in production since 2017, manages cross-channel campaigns autonomously across digital channels. Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing (generally available October 2024) interprets marketing briefs and produces on-brand ad assets for trafficking. The advertising manager's role has completed a transformation: from practitioner who personally placed ads, to supervisor who governed planners who placed ads, to strategic governor who sets objectives and brand safety rules for AI systems that do the rest.

    Effect on the work

    AI campaign management tools have compressed the advertising management function toward its most strategic layer, eliminating junior and mid-level execution roles. Employment of 11-2011 fell from 25,100 in 2019 to 21,100 in 2024, reflecting this consolidation.

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Advertising and Promotions Managers employment and pay by year

On record since1869
Latest US employment21,470 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$133,660 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-3.7% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
191015,000n/aEst., Association of National Advertisers Researched contextReport
1920n/a$2,500Est., A Short History of Advertising Researched contextReport
193030,000n/aEst., History of advertising Researched contextReport
196060,000$9,000Est., Golden Age of Advertising (employment) Researched contextEst., ANA Educational Foundation (pay) Researched contextReport
200371,100$60,350BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200457,100$63,610BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200541,710$68,860BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200638,130$73,060BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200736,300$78,250BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200836,100$80,220BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200935,760$82,370BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201032,240$83,890BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201130,710$87,650BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201228,420$88,590BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201328,530$93,880BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201429,340$96,720BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201529,340$95,890BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201628,860$100,810BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201728,100$106,130BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201825,260$117,130BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201925,100$125,510BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202022,490$133,460BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202122,520$127,150BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202222,010$127,830BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202320,630$131,870BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202421,100$126,960BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202521,470$133,660BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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