Marketing Jobs Over $200K

Trump’s firing of the BLS chief has sent the markets wobbling, and with good reason: when the person in charge of the country’s job stats gets the boot, confidence tends to follow. The bigger question, though, is this: with trust in official numbers already on shaky ground, where do we turn now for a clear view of the job market?

Our long-time readers might remember we’ve voiced our doubts before. The official unemployment rate, for instance, is based on a monthly survey of 60,000 households. As of April 2025, the response rate had slipped to just 68%, down from over 88% a decade ago. That leaves us with numbers built on a shrinking sample: roughly 3 in every 10,000 Americans. And by current definitions, even a single hour of gig work during the reference week qualifies someone as “employed.”

The JOLTS report - which tracks job openings, hires, quits, and layoffs - relies on employer surveys with a response rate now down to 35%. That’s just 7,000 businesses speaking for the entire economy!!!! It’s a bit like judging national sentiment based on a few dozen tweets. Or your marketing agency mailing out a handful of pen-and-paper surveys just to your neighborhood for your latest nationwide programmatic audience strategy project.

Which begs the question: isn’t it time we modernize how we measure work?

A better system could combine real payroll data from processors like ADP and tax filings from the IRS, alongside job-posting trends from companies’ ATS or sites like LinkedIn and Indeed. Spending data from banks and credit cards could help track shifts in income and employment, while gig platforms and small business tools like Square or Stripe could fill in the gaps that traditional surveys miss.

Add a bit of AI to the mix - analyzing sentiment, forecasting layoffs, tracking workforce shifts in real time - and suddenly we’re not just getting better data, we’re getting it faster. No more waiting for monthly snapshots that already feel outdated and need revision the moment they land as the anchor for global financial markets.

In our view, the way we measure work hasn’t kept pace with how people actually work. But the data’s out there, it’s just waiting for a smarter approach to bring it all together.

The good news? Some organizations are already making a difference.

Take our partner, Aspen Technology Labs. They’ve built a rather clever system that scrapes and tracks job listings directly from company career sites and applicant tracking systems. If a company has a careers page tied to its domain, Aspen’s on it. In Q2 2025 alone, they tracked over 14.4 million jobs across 152,000 company sites in 18,000 U.S. cities - at a scale that makes most government data look like it’s been scribbled on a beermat.

For job-curious CMO Ladder readers - we will continue to provide you bi-weekly updates and quarterly reports based on real employer data, so you can do your own homework on trends in the employment marketplace and plan your own career accordingly.

As of this week, there are 33,702 in-house marketing roles open in the U.S., a modest dip of -1.3% year-over-year. Of those, 4,237 are at the senior level (Director and above), showing a slight uptick of 0.6% YoY. Encouragingly, over half (55.6%) of job postings now include a salary range. For senior marketers, the median pay clocks in at $150,998, while across all levels it’s $84,999.

Break it down further, and here’s the salary picture.

• Chief Marketing Officer: $269,994

• SVP/Head of Marketing: $200,002

• VP/Director of Marketing: $163,998

• Marketing Manager: $118,310

• Marketing Specialist: $70,002

Median salaries of senior marketing jobs in major U.S. cities:

Now, let’s look at some of the fresh marketing jobs that caught our eye this week…

SBM Management ranks among the largest janitorial and facilities-services providers in the United States. The privately held, minority-owned company, headquartered near Sacramento, keeps more than 1,000 corporate and tech campuses spotless worldwide and generates up to $1.3 billion in annual revenue.

Its competitive edge rests on three pillars: 4insite, a home-grown platform that gives managers real-time data on every task; OSHA’s VPP Star safety certification, a badge few soft-services peers hold; and the extra pull a certified Minority Business Enterprise brings in Fortune 500 supplier-diversity programs.

That low-profile scale explains why the company now wants its first formally titled Chief Marketing Officer. For years, the brand belonged to Marcos Salvi, a designer turned EVP Creative, while Jennifer Kerns handled demand generation and communications. Kerns’s recent exit, after fourteen heart-forward years, leaves a culture shaped by empathy but craving unified growth leadership. The new CMO, budgeted at $325k–$400k and reporting to the President, will fuse brand, pipeline, and analytics into one voice.

Salary at this height signals more than a scrub and polish of the marketing function is required. If Taligence had the mandate to fill this CMO role? We would poach from the same industrial giants that already sell spotless floors and low-friction contracts to the Fortune 500...think ABM Industries, ISS A/S, Aramark, CBRE, and JLL. JLL’s Siddharth Taparia is the stand-out CMO in this pack, with his “See a Brighter Way” brand refresh, Times Square Launch, and CBRE’s Benji Baer a close second.

If you're the winning candidate, you must respect a workforce wary of wage pressures, polish a brand that competes with ABM-scale giants, and still unlock EBITDA. Do that, and Sacramento’s best-kept secret becomes a national headline.

Jack Link’s is a billion–dollar family firm built on jerky and a hairy mascot named Sasquatch. From its roots in Minong, Wisconsin, the company now runs 11 plants, controls roughly half of the U.S. meat-snack aisle, and splashes its “Feed Your Wild Side” line across NASCAR races and convenience-store endcaps. Yet last year revenue slipped almost 5% while health-forward rivals grew, and the brand’s Glassdoor culture pulse is middling. The Georgia mega-plant that comes online next spring will add 30% capacity, but the real leverage sits in marketing. That is why the family has opened a Minneapolis-based Vice President of Marketing seat with full P & L ownership and a salary ceiling just over 300 grand.

The new VP faces a busy to-do list. First, win back lapsed shoppers while keeping serious meat fans. Next, put zero-sugar and poultry sticks on every shelf. Then, turn the Doritos mash-up from a one-off stunt into a real sales engine. Margin matters too. Beef prices are rising, and club stores push cheap house brands. Jack and Troy Link probably still sign off on every big move. The winner will blend bold brand ideas with the family’s fast, hands-on style.

If Taligence ran the search, we would fish in two ponds. The first is the big snack makers like Frito-Lay, Hershey’s Amplify, and Conagra’s Slim Jim team. Their marketers live under tight targets and know retail math and TikTok tricks. The second pond holds the rebels: Liquid Death, Beyond Meat, and other upstarts that turn social buzz into shelf space. A leader who has grown an edgy voice into nationwide sales could give Sasquatch sharper teeth.

Short-listed candidates should bring one clear model. Show how each new flavor speeds sales in convenience stores and lifts margin. Explain how you will use the extra Georgia capacity for retailer exclusives. Map a path to jerky with under 3% sugar and be ready to defend that plan when health rules tighten.

Jack Link’s remains the undisputed volume leader in U.S. meat snacks, bolstered by iconic branding, deep manufacturing roots, and channel muscle. If the family can pair its Georgia scale-up with cleaner-label product wins and leverage Sasquatch for Gen-Z humor, Jack Link’s will keep Old Trapper and Slim Jim in the rear-view mirror.

LaunchDarkly helps software teams turn a risky “big-bang” release into a safe, slow-drip rollout. Its cloud tool lets engineers switch new features on or off without touching the code. Investors have written cheques worth about $330 million, lifting the private valuation to roughly $3 billion. The company now claims thousands of paying customers and keeps a “Leader” badge in G2’s latest feature-management reports.

The firm is hiring a Vice President of Demand Generation. Pay tops $361,000 plus stock for Bay Area or New York talent, a bracket that shows the board wants steadier growth. Your goal is clear: turn free-tier buzz into a forecastable sales pipeline, then prove it every quarter. You will report to CMO Manish Gupta, who is pitching LaunchDarkly as the safest way to ship AI-driven apps. Success means guiding that story from developer chat rooms into C-suite budgets.

Culture will test you as much as channel allocation. Glassdoor chatter points to the usual scaling pains, shifting priorities, and a sales versus engineering tug-of-war, not unusual for SaaS with such a chasm between valuation and ARR realities.

If Taligence ran this search, we would start with high-velocity DevOps vendors. Think Datadog, HashiCorp and their peers. Their demand-gen leads already juggle product-led funnels and six-figure deals, and they sell to the same engineering buyer. We would also tap the demand-gen crowd at Optimizely and Split, which talks to product managers about speed and risk every day. Alumni from these shops arrive fluent in developer trust.

If you make the interview loop, bring two things. First, a simple model that shows how free users become booked revenue. Second, a plan for the first quarter that pairs with sales leadership and calms engineers who fear corporate gloss. Ask how decisions flow while the CEO chair is still open (former CEO Dan quit a month ago for the Asana CEO job) show how you will spend every dollar of the budget, and be ready to defend efficiency if growth dips below thirty percent. Nail those points and you will hold the throttle on a company many expect to file an S-1 before the decade closes.

Worst job description I’ve seen for a while, but don’t let that turn you off.

What’s happening here is obvious to any large-company Talent Acquisition Veteran. This is where HR folks have over-engineered and templatized everything to death in service of efficiency… and the JD becomes utterly confusing word salad.

Let’s try to work out what they need from this travesty of a JD.

It appears to me that this role is a one-off, unique, and instead of properly diagnosing and describing the need, they grabbed the nearest template, which was the Studio Leader role that’s continually referenced through the copy (11 times). The Studio is where Clorox in-houses a lot of design/content production for the brands, for organic social, print, digital, etc, but I think this role sits adjacent to it; it’s not running the Studio.

And look, I could be wrong.

Clorox turns 110 next year, yet its brands still touch daily life...from bleach and wipes to Brita filters and Burt’s Bees balm. The company now needs a Head of Marketing & Innovation in Oakland who can earn up to $360,000. The task is plain despite the garbage JD: be a creative spark for new demand while guarding the trust that makes a yellow bleach cap feel like a safety seal.

Margins are healthy again A new AI supply system. has trimmed costs across bottles and wipes, freeing cash for growth bets. Leadership wants ideas that move Clorox beyond disinfectants, such as low-plastic refill packs, Brita-style subscriptions, and “Clean Feels Good” scents that link hygiene with mood. A first-party data cloud of 100 million shoppers already guides planners at Walmart, Target, and Instacart, so the next marketer has a real-time traffic map in hand. And don’t forget there’s a strong relationship with Omnicom Media Group, who have had a hand in the marketing innovation outcomes of many top CPGs.

Taligence would fish first inside big rivals like Unilever, Reckitt, where brand chiefs live on science claims, creativity is often insourced, although well supported by agency partners, and innovation is table stakes. We would also scan fast movers like Grove Collaborative, Method, and Blueland, whose growth teams sell “clean and kind” on TikTok.

Short-listed candidates should walk in with one clear page: a new product idea, a framework for brand-safe experiments, and a margin lift. Lay out a 90-day pilot that aligns R&D, finance, and media, and mark the gates for scale. Be ready to defend every dollar...CMO Eric Schwartz loves lean plans. Show you can coach data scientists and agency creatives alike, and you’ll lead the engine that keeps Clorox’s forty brands bright long after the bleach bottle runs dry.

Here are a few more roles worth a closer look: each one a tidy opportunity in its own right. And if you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to the full spread: a curated list of the highest-paying marketing jobs posted in the last 30 days. Fresh, well-compensated, and handpicked - just how we like it.

Don’t have the cash to splash for a subscription? Share the ladder with your job-curious marketing peeps to help support our research and writing.

Become a paying subscriber of Premium to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Already a paying subscriber? Sign In.

A subscription gets you:

• • Access to all the movers in a downloadable format
• • Hand picked curated listings of $200K jobs in marketing
• • No annoying ads