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Marketing managers

Also called Head of marketing, VP of marketing, Chief marketing officer, CMO, Brand manager

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 395,240 US marketing managers, with median pay of $166,790 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 40,000 from 1950, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for marketing managers: Snowflake data cloud + Segment CDP + programmatic advertising + attribution modeling, 2012 to 2022. The data-stack era created demand for marketing analysts and data engineers embedded inside marketing teams.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 6.9% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 57.8% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.014 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.014. BLS counted 174,010 of these jobs in May 2013 and 395,240 in May 2025 (+127%, a change derived by Future History).

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). Marketing managers: jobs and pay since 1950 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2021

Chicago

Future History. "Marketing managers: jobs and pay since 1950." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2021.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_11_2021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Marketing managers: jobs and pay since 1950}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-2021}}, 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
195019752000now
2026
Known then as Brand Manager / Product Manager (P&G McElroy system)
Known then as Brand Manager / Marketing Manager / Director of Marketing
Known then as Marketing Manager / Director of Marketing / VP Marketing (Kotler era)
Known then as Marketing Manager / VP Marketing / CMO (digital-transition era)
Known then as Marketing Managers (BLS SOC 11-2021)
Known today as Marketing Managers (BLS SOC 11-2021)
Projected to still be called Marketing Managers (BLS SOC 11-2021)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
395K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$166,790
Est.

≈ $162,514 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1931

Neil McElroy writes his 800-word brand management memo at Procter and Gamble on May 13, 1931, proposing that a single manager should own the complete commercial destiny of one product -- marketing, advertising, sales volume, and profitability. P&G implements the model within a year; by the 1940s it has been adopted by Lever Brothers, Colgate, and General Foods. McElroy later became U.S. Secretary of Defense (1957-59). The memo is cited in business schools as the founding document of modern marketing management.

Beat · 1967

Philip Kotler publishes Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control (Prentice-Hall), the textbook that defines the 4Ps framework (product, price, place, promotion) and establishes marketing management as an academic discipline with a shared vocabulary and graduate-school curriculum. The book goes through 16 editions and is listed by the Financial Times among the 50 greatest business books. Every MBA marketing track taught since 1970 traces its lineage to the 1967 text.

Beat · 1994

The first banner advertisement runs on HotWired on October 27, 1994 -- an AT&T ad with approximately 44 percent click-through rate. Within five years the CTR for banner ads collapses below 1 percent as the web scales and user attention habituates. The banner ad begins a permanent shift of marketing budget toward digital channels with individual-level measurement, transforming marketing managers from media buyers to data analysts.

Beat · 2023

McKinsey Global Institute publishes The Economic Potential of Generative AI (June 2023), finding that marketing and sales functions show the largest potential productivity gain from generative AI across the enterprise: 33-44 percent from content generation and personalization. ChatGPT, launched November 2022, reaches 100 million users in two months. Jasper and Copy.ai report tens of thousands of enterprise marketing teams using AI copywriting tools. The per-unit cost of marketing content drops toward zero, expanding always-on content expectations placed on marketing managers.

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 marketing 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
+6.9%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 11-2021 (Marketing managers): 421.6 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 450.8 thousand in 2035, a change of +29.1 thousand (+6.9%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (5.3% 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)
57.8%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 11-2021.00 Marketing Managers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.578, 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) 0.219 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.938; GPT-4-rated β 0.5. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
1.4%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 11-2021 Marketing Managers: probability of computerisation 0.014, rank 61 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for marketing managers

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

AI is sitting alongside you hereOversee AI-powered performance-marketing copy optimization, briefing Persado or Phrasee with campaign objectives and regulatory guardrails, reviewing winning language variants at scale, and translating performance signals (which emotional triggers drive conversion) into updated brand messaging frameworks.

Oversee AI-powered performance-marketing copy optimization, briefing Persado or Phrasee with campaign objectives and regulatory guardrails, reviewing winning language variants at scale, and translating performance signals (which emotional triggers drive conversion) into updated brand messaging frameworks.[11],[12],[13]

Where your edge is

Your role shifts to upstream (setting the objective function, brand safety constraints, and regulatory guardrails) and downstream (interpreting what the winning language reveals about customer psychology and updating the brand messaging strategy accordingly).

AI is sitting alongside you hereGovern the AI-powered creative production pipeline using Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, setting brand guidelines, approving on-brand asset templates, reviewing AI-generated ad variants for display/social/email channels, and using performance data to refresh creative when click-through rates signal ad fatigue.

Govern the AI-powered creative production pipeline using Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing, setting brand guidelines, approving on-brand asset templates, reviewing AI-generated ad variants for display/social/email channels, and using performance data to refresh creative when click-through rates signal ad fatigue.[14],[15],[16],[7]

Where your edge is

Shift from approving individual assets to governing the brand standards that AI enforces at scale. Build and maintain a rigorous brand guidelines document in GenStudio: color palettes, tone prohibitions, legal review triggers. Your judgment determines quality ceiling; AI determines throughput.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDefine audience segmentation strategy and configure Salesforce Einstein Marketing Cloud to execute personalization at scale, setting predictive segment criteria, approving AI-recommended content selection rules, and reviewing anomaly alerts when campaign performance deviates from projected thresholds.

Define audience segmentation strategy and configure Salesforce Einstein Marketing Cloud to execute personalization at scale, setting predictive segment criteria, approving AI-recommended content selection rules, and reviewing anomaly alerts when campaign performance deviates from projected thresholds.[17],[18],[3]

Where your edge is

The strategic value is in defining the segmentation logic and the business rules for personalization, which customer signals map to which offers, and at what point personalization tips into brand-unsafe territory. Einstein executes; you own the guardrails and the segment strategy that determines whether personalization actually converts.

Where marketing managers go next

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

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Advertising and Promotions Managers

Marketing Managers often own advertising budgets and work closely with paid media teams; the pivot to Advertising and Promotions Manager is a natural specialization. This is most relevant for marketing managers at companies where advertising is the primary growth lever (consumer brands, DTC, CPG). The role is more narrowly focused on paid media, creative campaigns, and promotional events, with less exposure to brand strategy and product marketing breadth. AI is heavily disrupting paid media buying and creative production, so this pivot should be paired with strong AI tool fluency to remain competitive.

What you'd add
· Creative production workflows using Adobe GenStudio for ad variant testing
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of marketing managers changed since 1903?

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

  • Print advertising + mass media agencies (JWT, BBD&O, Ayer): the pre-brand era

    Before the brand-manager model existed, marketing at a consumer-goods company meant placing advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and radio: work managed by advertising agencies like J. Walter Thompson (founded 1864), N.W. Ayer & Son (1869), and Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (1918). The marketing function inside the manufacturer was an advertising manager who approved copy, managed agency relationships, and allocated spend across publications. P&G first organized a brand-specific advertising budget in 1903; the company began sponsoring radio programs in the late 1920s, creating what would become known as soap operas, serialized radio dramas whose sole purpose was to deliver a captive audience for Ivory and Crisco ads. The tool set was simple: copy brief, print proof, radio script, and circulation audits from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (founded 1914, the first independent measurement of print audience).

    Effect on the work

    The advertising manager of this era spent most of their time on copy approval and agency management, not on data. Measurement was limited to circulation figures and occasional consumer surveys. The strategic job of deciding which markets to serve was typically done by the company founder or general manager, not by a specialist.

  • The brand-manager system (P&G McElroy 1931) + television advertising (1941/1948+)

    Neil McElroy's 1931 memo at Procter & Gamble created the modern marketing management role by assigning full brand accountability (strategy, advertising, sales volume, and P&L) to a single person rather than distributing it across functional departments. The brand manager became a product CEO: responsible for a coherent positioning strategy, a budget allocation across media channels, and the measurement of results. Television advertising (the first national TV commercials ran in 1941 on WNBT New York; mass-market TV advertising exploded after 1948 as set ownership crossed about a million US homes) added a new channel. Nielsen Media Research (founded 1923; Nielsen Television Ratings from 1950) provided the first audience-measurement infrastructure for television. The combination of brand-manager accountability with TV reach measurement created the job template that would dominate US consumer-goods marketing for decades.

  • Kotler Marketing Management (1967) + direct mail + focus groups + early database marketing

    Philip Kotler's 1967 textbook Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control formalized the marketing function as an academic discipline and gave practitioners a common vocabulary: market segmentation, the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion), the product life cycle, and brand positioning frameworks. This is the point at which marketing management became a profession with a credentialing infrastructure: an MBA marketing track and a body of theory that justified the marketing manager's seat at the executive table. Theodore Levitt's Marketing Myopia in the Harvard Business Review (1960) had already argued that companies should define their markets by customer need; Kotler systematized that argument into a teachable framework. The tools of this era were expensive and slow: focus groups required agency facilitation and weeks to analyze, direct-mail campaigns required physical lists and printing timelines, and the first relational database marketing systems (Epsilon, Acxiom) allowed segmentation of mailing lists by demographic proxy but not by real-time behavior.

  • First online advertising (HotWired/AT&T banner 1994) + Salesforce CRM (1999) + search advertising (Google AdWords 2000)

    On October 27, 1994, AT&T paid HotWired to run the first banner advertisement on the web. Approximately 44% of people who saw it clicked it: a click-through rate that would never be approached again as web advertising scaled and users grew desensitized. The banner ad announced that the web was an advertising medium, and marketing managers began allocating fractions of their budgets to a channel with, for the first time, individual-level click measurement rather than population-level audience estimates. Salesforce's founding in March 1999 gave marketing managers a shared customer database for the first time: a place where the prospect the marketing team generated and the customer the sales team closed lived in the same record. Google AdWords, launched in October 2000, introduced the pay-per-click model: marketing managers could buy specific search queries and pay only when a user clicked. This was the most measurable advertising medium that had ever existed, and it permanently shifted budget authority toward people who could prove ROI in a spreadsheet.

    Effect on the work

    The measurability of digital advertising created a new type of marketing manager, the performance marketer, who spent more time optimizing cost-per-click and conversion rates than managing creative strategy. The split between brand marketing (historically dominant) and performance marketing (newly measurable) defined the generational conflict in marketing organizations through the 2000s.

  • Google Analytics (2005) + HubSpot inbound platform (2006) + Marketo marketing automation (2008) + web analytics ubiquity

    Google Analytics, launched in November 2005 after Google acquired Urchin Software in April 2005, made professional-grade web analytics free for every website. Marketing managers who had previously paid agency fees for site traffic reports could now see page-level traffic, referral sources, and goal completions in real time. HubSpot, founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, coined the term inbound marketing and built an integrated platform combining blogging tools, email automation, lead scoring, and CRM connectors. The argument was that interruption-based advertising (display, direct mail, cold calls) was losing effectiveness as consumers tuned it out, and that content-led lead generation was replacing it. Marketo, founded in 2006 and launching its product in 2008, focused on the B2B marketing automation layer: managing multi-step email nurture sequences, syncing lead scores to Salesforce, and giving marketing teams measurable accountability for pipeline revenue.

    Effect on the work

    Marketing automation reduced the clerical labor of sending campaigns while raising the analytical bar for the manager designing the system. HubSpot and Marketo created a new credential class: the marketing operations manager, who owned the technical configuration of the automation stack. The role began bifurcating into creative/strategy and technical/operations tracks.

  • Snowflake data cloud (2012) + Segment CDP (2012) + programmatic advertising + attribution modeling

    Snowflake, founded in July 2012, and Segment, also founded in 2012, together created the modern data stack for marketing: a cloud data warehouse that could hold billions of events and a customer data platform (CDP) that could unify customer identities across every touchpoint. For the first time, a marketing manager could answer: what is the total revenue impact of this campaign, across every channel, attributed across the full customer journey? Programmatic advertising, driven by real-time bidding platforms (Google Display Network, The Trade Desk, Meta Ads Manager), meant that creative decisions and audience targeting decisions were increasingly machine-automated. A marketing manager no longer bought placements; she set objectives, budgets, and audience parameters and the algorithm decided which impressions to buy in milliseconds. The role shifted from media buyer to algorithm supervisor. Attribution modeling became a full-time specialization inside larger marketing organizations.

    Effect on the work

    The data-stack era created demand for marketing analysts and data engineers embedded inside marketing teams. Headcount growth accelerated: BLS OEWS recorded 240,440 marketing managers in 2018 versus 164,590 in 2010, an increase in eight years, driven partly by the expansion of marketing scope into previously unmeasured digital channels. But it also concentrated power in the handful of managers who could read a Snowflake SQL query and understand a multi-touch attribution report.

  • Generative AI copywriting (ChatGPT, Claude, Jasper, Copy.ai) + AI ad-creative (Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max) + AI-native analytics

    ChatGPT launched in November 2022; within six months it was the most widely adopted enterprise software productivity tool in the history of software. Jasper and Copy.ai had already built marketing-specific text generation products on GPT-3, but ChatGPT collapsed the awareness curve. McKinsey, in its June 2023 report The Economic Potential of Generative AI, found that marketing and sales functions showed the largest share of potential value from generative AI across the enterprise, with 33-44% productivity gains from AI-assisted content generation and personalization. The operational implication was clear: the cost of generating a unit of marketing content dropped toward zero. A single marketing manager with generative AI tooling could produce what previously required a team of copywriters, graphic designers, and content strategists. Meta Advantage+, launched in 2022, and Google Performance Max, launched in 2021, extended AI to media execution: both platforms use machine learning to generate ad creative variants and automatically allocate budget across placements, pushing the algorithm further into territory previously owned by creative directors and media planners.

    Effect on the work

    The productivity effect is real but the displacement risk for marketing managers specifically is low. Frey and Osborne (2013) assigned a 1.4% automation probability to marketing managers, the lowest decile of any management occupation. The reason: the role is fundamentally one of strategy, stakeholder alignment, and judgment under uncertainty. The task that AI accelerates is content production; the task that AI cannot replace is deciding what story to tell, to whom, and why it matters for the business. The BLS projects 26,700 new marketing manager openings per year through 2034, driven by the expansion of digital channels and the increasing scope of the function.

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Marketing Managers employment and pay by year

On record since1931
Latest US employment395,240 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$166,790 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+6.9% 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
195040,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1970110,000$13,500Est., Kotler (1967) (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS Historical Statistics (pay) Researched contextReport
1980180,000$26,000Est., IPUMS USA (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS CPS Annual Social and Economic… (pay) Researched contextReport
2000202,100$71,240BLS OEWS 2000 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2000 (pay) Official statisticReport
2003182,600$83,210BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004177,550$87,640BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005166,470$92,680BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006159,950$98,720BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007165,240$104,400BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008166,790$108,580BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009169,330$110,030BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010164,590$112,800BLS OEWS May 2010 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2010 (pay) Official statisticReport
2011168,410$116,010BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012171,430$119,480BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013174,010$123,220BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014184,490$127,130BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015192,890$128,750BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016205,900$131,180BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017218,970$132,230BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018240,440$134,290BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019263,680$136,850BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020270,200$142,170BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021278,690$135,030BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022328,570$140,040BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023368,940$157,620BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024384,980$161,030BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025395,240$166,790BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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