The Decline of Skilled Marketers
IN THE UNITED STATES AND UNITED KINGDOM
A Research Briefing with Sources from Marketing Trade Press
Compiled: February 2026
Key Sources: Marketing Week, The Drum, CIM, WFA/MediaSense
Marketing is a big player in the UK and US economies. In the UK alone, the advertising and marketing services sector contributes billions in GDP and employs hundreds of thousands of people. In the US, employers posted 376,200 marketing and creative jobs in 2025 alone (Robert Half, 2026).
INTRODUCTION
So we wanted to understand what’s happening to the people who actually do the work. Are there enough skilled marketers to go around? Are they getting better or worse at what they do? And if there’s a problem, how bad is it really?
The answer, it turns out, is worse than most people think.
What started as a cyclical skills shortage has become something structural. The profession is losing people, failing to train the ones it keeps, paying them less than competing sectors, and — most recently — watching AI quietly eliminate roles from the bottom up. On top of all that, marketing is systematically pushing out its most experienced practitioners in favour of younger, cheaper talent that often lacks the strategic capabilities the industry says it desperately needs.
This briefing pulls together evidence from the leading marketing trade publications — Marketing Week, The Drum, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) — to show you the full picture.
Here’s the ‘too long; didn’t read’ version:
75.8% of marketers identify AI expertise as a major skills gap in their business.
60.5% say their organisation has a marketing effectiveness skills gap — the most fundamental competency a marketer can have.
88% of UK marketing employers experienced skills shortages in the last year.
79% of UK marketers are under 45. Just 6.2% of the UK ad industry workforce is over 50.
US marketing job postings fell 8% year-on-year. UK marketing vacancies declined for 14 consecutive months.
The US voluntary quit rate has dropped to 2% — the lowest in a decade. Marketers aren’t moving. They’re frozen.
As you read this briefing, consider your own team: how many of these problems do you recognise? And most importantly — what are you going to do about them?
1. The Scale of the Skills Shortage
What makes this research worthwhile
If you’re a CMO, a CEO, or anyone responsible for a marketing team’s output, the data in this section should concern you. It shows that the gap between what marketers can do and what they need to do is widening — and despite years of hand-wringing about it, very little is actually changing.
1.1 UK: Marketing Week’s Career & Salary Survey
Marketing Week’s annual Career & Salary Survey is the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset on UK marketing skills, now in its 27th year. It surveys more than 3,500 brand-side marketers. The findings are consistent, and consistently bad.
Data & Analytics: A gap nobody’s closing
For three consecutive years (2022–2024), data and analytics has been identified as the single biggest skills gap in UK marketing teams. In the 2024 survey, 36.9% of respondents named it as their primary concern, up from 34.4% in 2023. Performance marketing skills ranked second at 19.6%, followed by content and copywriting (18.1%), social media (14.8%), and ecommerce (12.1%).
Source: Marketing Week, ‘Marketers point to data analysis as biggest skills gap in teams’, 1 March 2024
Think about that for a moment. The same skills gap has topped the list for three years running, and it’s getting worse, not better. If your car broke down three years in a row for the same reason, you’d fix it. The marketing industry apparently wouldn’t.
Marketing Effectiveness: The really alarming one
In the 2025 survey, marketing effectiveness emerged as the dominant core marketing skills gap. 60.5% of the 3,500+ respondents identified a lack of effectiveness knowledge in their business. Among CMOs and marketing directors, the figure rose to 65.9%.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘Over half of brands facing marketing effectiveness skills gap’, 22 April 2025
Marketing effectiveness — stripped to its simplest form — means ensuring the work your function does is driving meaningful impact for the business. It’s arguably the single most important competency a marketer can have. The fact that three in five marketers feel their team isn’t properly equipped for it should make anyone with budget responsibility uncomfortable.
AI Expertise: A gap that’s widening faster than you can fill it
The 2025 survey found that 75.8% of respondents identified AI expertise as a major skills gap in their business, overtaking even data and analytics. Over two-fifths (42.8%) reported a lack of martech understanding in their organisation, compounded by a 59.4% data and analytics skills gap. For B2B marketers specifically, 51.5% reported an AI skills gap, rising to 58.6% in large organisations.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘80% of CMOs concerned about AI skills gap’, 7 April 2025; ‘Why are marketing teams struggling to close martech skills gaps?’, February 2026
Three-quarters of your peers say they don’t understand the technology reshaping their profession. That’s not a skills gap — it’s a structural crisis.
Tactical Skills: The full picture
Across tactical disciplines, the 2025 survey painted a bleak landscape: 56.9% identifying a performance marketing skills gap; 46.1% reporting social media skills gaps; 41.3% flagging ecommerce expertise shortfalls; and 40.6% noting content and copywriting deficits.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘Over half of brands facing performance marketing skills gap’, 8 April 2025
1.2 What employers are saying: CIM and Hays
The Chartered Institute of Marketing, working with recruitment partner Hays, surveyed over 400 marketing professionals and employers in 2024. Their findings reinforced the Marketing Week data with an employer-side view: 88% of marketing employers reported experiencing skills shortages in the previous year, while 52% lacked access to the skills needed for emerging technologies like AI.
Source: CIM Newsroom, ‘Economic headwinds and skills gap to challenge marketing industry in 2025’, 2024
Let that sink in: nearly nine in ten employers can’t find the skills they need, and over half say they’re not equipped for the technology that’s about to redefine their function.
1.3 The global view: WFA/MediaSense
The World Federation of Advertisers, working with global media advisors MediaSense, found that nearly half (48%) of advertisers, agencies, ad tech companies, and media owners believed the industry was facing its worst-ever talent crisis — rising to 54% among agencies. 77% of respondents reported some or high scarcity of talent, peaking at 85% in the agency and ad tech sectors and 81% in the US. Most critically, 67% believed talent scarcity was proving to be a major blocker to growth.
Source: WFA/MediaSense, ‘Media’s Got Talent?’, 2022 (cited by The Drum and industry bodies through 2025)
When two-thirds of an industry says its talent shortage is blocking growth, that’s not a recruitment problem. That’s a business model problem.
2. The Collapsing of Job Market
2.1 Welcome to The Great Stay
In February 2026, Mark Ritson wrote a landmark column for The Drum that named the phenomenon most marketers have been feeling but couldn’t articulate: The Great Stay.
The picture is this. The Taligence 2025 Marketing Jobs Report, based on more than 240,000 US in-house marketing listings, found total postings fell 8% year-on-year. Britain’s Office for National Statistics showed marketing and advertising job openings down 8% since 2022 as well. The US voluntary quit rate dropped to 2% — the lowest in a decade. UK marketing salaries grew just 3% in 2025, against a national average of 6%. In the US, the average marketing salary actually fell by 3%.
Source: The Drum, Mark Ritson: ‘The Great Stay and the quiet collapse of the marketing job market’, 9 February 2026
Fewer jobs. Less mobility. Worse pay. The rational conclusion for any marketer currently employed? Stay exactly where you are. Don’t move. Don’t negotiate. Keep your head down. That’s The Great Stay.
2.2 UK vacancy decline
UK marketing job vacancies declined for 14 consecutive months through December 2024. Permanent job vacancies nationally shrank at the fastest rate in four years, per KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC). For senior marketers, roles were described as ‘few and far between.’ Graduate marketing positions saw a 67% reduction in hiring intention.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘How is marketing recruitment shaping up in 2025?’, 9 January 2025
If you’re a senior marketer who lost your role in 2024, you already know this. If you haven’t lost your role, the data says you’re staying put not because you’re happy, but because the alternative is worse.
2.3 A K-shaped impact
Ritson identified a K-shaped pattern in the job market: senior marketers continue to prosper, but lower-level peers are losing their roles. AI is hollowing out the middle and bottom of the profession while leaving the top relatively intact — for now. The Taligence report noted that director-level roles held up throughout 2025, while new graduates were fighting for oxygen and mid-career professionals found themselves squeezed out.
Source: The Drum, Mark Ritson, February 2026
This is the worst possible shape for a healthy profession. If you’re not developing junior talent today, you won’t have senior talent in five years. The pipeline is thinning at precisely the moment the industry needs it most.
3. Why This Is Happening
Skills shortages don’t materialise from thin air. Here are the root causes, and they’re all reinforcing each other.
3.1 AI is replacing roles, not just tasks
HubSpot reports that 74% of marketing professionals already use AI day-to-day. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey from September 2025 found that 12% of service firms had already reduced hiring because of AI, and nearly a quarter of those planning to adopt it expected to hire fewer workers. Forrester initially predicted US advertising agencies would lose 8% of jobs to automation by 2030. Its most recent report upgraded that estimate to 15% — by the end of 2026.
Source: The Drum, Mark Ritson, February 2026; Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Forrester
Here’s what that looks like in practice: when someone leaves a marketing team in 2026, the role doesn’t get posted on LinkedIn four weeks later. The role disappears. Almost a quarter of marketers told Marketing Week their business had cut senior leaders and not replaced them. This isn’t a budget cycle. It’s a permanent structural contraction.
3.2 Nobody is investing in training
You’d think that an industry with well-documented skills gaps would be investing heavily in closing them. You’d be wrong.
Marketing Week’s 2024 survey found that 48.8% of respondents had not been offered the opportunity to upskill — a substantial increase from 2023. Only 11.2% of businesses had conducted any form of skills audit. Nearly half of marketers have no access to training that addresses the very gaps their employers say are critical.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘Marketing leaders on tackling the upskilling imperative’, 4 March 2024
This is the equivalent of diagnosing the problem, agreeing it’s serious, and then doing nothing about it. Year after year.
3.3 Wages aren’t competitive
The Drum reported that the Advertising Association (AA) and top marketers had identified low wages as a root cause of the talent drought. Marketing sits in direct competition with tech, finance, and consulting for the same graduates — especially in data and analytical roles. But the industry’s pay doesn’t come close. Skills shortages are most acute at entry-level and mid-level (three to five years in), precisely the career stages where competitive pay matters most.
Source: The Drum, ‘Top marketers have realized low wages are causing tech talent drought’, 1 February 2023
ManpowerGroup’s annual talent shortage survey found that 74% of employers globally still struggle to find the talent they need. The marketing profession’s problem is part of this broader pattern, but it’s made worse by wages that effectively price the industry out of the market for the people it most needs to hire.
Source: The Drum, ‘Are marketing execs still in a fight for talent?’, 12 February 2025
3.4 The ‘more with less’ death spiral
Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey revealed that 54.9% of marketers are being asked to do more with less without an appropriate increase in pay, up sharply from 40.1% the prior year. Almost half (46.5%) experienced team restructuring in 2024. Over a quarter (28.5%) saw their team merge with other functions.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘More with less the tough reality for over half of marketers’, 13 March 2025
If more than half your workforce is being asked to absorb more responsibility with no extra pay, you don’t have an efficiency strategy. You have a retention problem waiting to detonate.
3.5 Outsourcing as a sticking plaster
Faced with shrinking teams and widening skills gaps, almost two-thirds of brands have outsourced work to an agency or third party in the past 12 months. In Marketing Week’s 2024 data, 46.2% of respondents outsourced an element of their marketing, with 48.7% citing a lack of in-house skills as the primary reason and 28.7% citing shrinking team sizes.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘Skills gaps, restructures, outsourcing: 5 interesting stats from Salary Survey 2024’, 18 March 2024
Outsourcing isn’t a long-term solution to a skills problem. It’s a coping mechanism. And when you’re outsourcing because your team has shrunk and you can’t afford to hire, you’re not solving the problem — you’re exporting it.
3.6 The talent pipeline is drying up
The Drum has reported extensively on how fewer juniors being hired today means fewer senior marketers tomorrow. The IPA’s Talent and Diversity Conference heard that talent recruitment and retention had reached a crisis point, with agency leaders acknowledging that hybrid working — while beneficial for flexibility — had resulted in junior staff missing critical development time. Mid-level workers are leaving the industry entirely for better pay in tech and other sectors.
Source: The Drum, ‘‘They’re missing development time’: agency bosses need to step up to support young talent’, 6 May 2022; The Drum, ‘There’s a talent shortage. Freelancers are your friends, not foes’, 8 January 2024
Think of it like a farm that stops planting seeds but still expects a harvest. It works for a year, maybe two. Then the fields are empty.
4. Marketing’s Age Crisis: A Young Profession Pushing Out Its Elders
If the skills shortage is the problem everyone talks about, ageism is the one they don’t. And the data suggests it should be talked about far more.
4.1 The numbers: marketing is dramatically young
Marketing Week’s 2024 Career & Salary Survey found that 79% of marketers were aged under 45. The breakdown: 40.2% were aged 26–35, 30% were aged 36–45, and just 20.4% were aged 46–65. Only 8.6% were aged 18–25.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘79% of marketers aged under 45, study reveals’, 23 July 2024
The 2023 survey was even starker: nearly three-quarters (74.6%) of respondents were aged 26–45, with almost half (47.3%) aged 26–35. Just 14.5% were aged 46–65. To put this in context, 58% of the UK working population as a whole falls between 25 and 49 according to the ONS. Marketing is considerably younger than the national workforce norm.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘Almost three quarters of marketers aged under 45’, 7 February 2023; ‘‘Rudely interrupted’: How should marketers handle the industry’s ageism problem?’, 20 February 2023
The Advertising Association’s All In Census corroborated these findings: around three-quarters of people across the advertising and marketing industry are under 45. An IPA Agency Census found the average age of employees in UK advertising agencies was just 33.9, with only 6.2% of the workforce made up of people aged 50 or older — despite that demographic representing 32% of the UK working population.
Source: IPA Agency Census; Advertising Association All In Census 2023
6.2% of the UK ad industry is over 50. 32% of the UK working population is over 50. That’s not a trend. It’s an exodus.
4.2 Older marketers are being pushed out
This isn’t natural career attrition. Marketing Week reported that recruiters and job-seeking marketers have confirmed there are currently more senior marketers out of work and looking for jobs than ever before. The causes: redundancy, frustration leading experienced professionals to leave, and a growing shift toward freelancing as a survival strategy.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘79% of marketers aged under 45, study reveals’, 23 July 2024
Former Royal Bank of Scotland Group CMO David Wheldon put it plainly to Marketing Week: the data doesn’t lie, there’s been a problem for several years, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
The Drum’s coverage reinforced the picture. Its reporting on ageism found that the over-40s and over-60s were hit hardest by job losses during the pandemic, according to the IPA Agency Census. Dentsu reported that the median age of staff across its British agencies was just 33. Agencies are ignoring a potential source of talent by only targeting younger applicants, while simultaneously complaining they can’t fill open positions.
Source: The Drum, ‘Ageism is a big problem in advertising, so what are agencies doing about it?’, 2021
In Australia — a market closely tracked by the global trade press — a 2024 study by the Experience Advocacy Taskforce found that over half (51.5%) of premature exits from advertising occurred in the 45–54 age bracket. Nearly 70% of those who entered the industry as ‘young guns’ between 18 and 24 had left before reaching their mid-career peak. They weren’t retiring. They were being squeezed out.
Source: Experience Advocacy Taskforce/AIC, October 2024
Here’s the irony: the industry that prides itself on understanding audiences is completely failing to understand its own workforce demographics.
4.3 The Gen X insecurity gap
Marketing Week’s 2024 survey revealed a stark generational divide. Only 27% of Gen X marketers felt more secure in their jobs than a year ago, compared with over half of their Gen Z colleagues. Gen Z respondents were also the happiest marketers (62.7%), ahead of Gen X (55.5%) and Gen Y (54.4%).
Source: Marketing Week, 2024 Career & Salary Survey
So the generation with the most experience and the deepest strategic knowledge feels the least secure. And the generation with the least experience feels the most comfortable. That imbalance should worry anyone thinking about the long-term health of their marketing function.
4.4 The ‘digital native’ fallacy
A persistent theme across the trade press is the industry’s obsession with ‘digital native’ credentials at the expense of broader strategic experience. Marketing Week reported that the rapid rate of technological change had led organisations to prioritise digital skills at the expense of traditional expertise, prompting senior marketers to report feeling edged out. 29% of marketers felt older people were under-represented or not represented at all within their business.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘The big debate: Is age discrimination rife in the marketing profession?’, 2017 (with ongoing coverage through 2024)
Jan Gooding, then Global Inclusion Director at Aviva, told Marketing Week she was informed by two top headhunters in her mid-40s that she was too old and wouldn’t even get an interview. Tom Goodwin, then at Zenith Media, described older professionals as a ‘secret population’ he was never exposed to, let alone had the pleasure of working alongside.
A Campaign survey found that 42% of advertising, marketing, media, and PR employees had witnessed ageism towards a colleague, and 32% had experienced it themselves. A WerkLabs survey found that 84% of marketing employees reported experiencing age-related discrimination.
Source: Campaign survey; WerkLabs survey (cited by Webbiquity, February 2025)
If 84% of your profession has experienced age discrimination and you’re not talking about it, the silence is the problem.
4.5 The commercial cost of losing experience
This isn’t just a fairness issue. It’s a commercial one. People over 50 account for over half of UK household consumer spending — £319 billion per year — yet only 5% of ad spend is targeted at adults aged 35–64. In the US, over-50s make up more than a third of the population but appear in just 15% of media images, according to AARP research. CreativeX assessed over 126,000 ads globally and found that just 4% of the people featured were over 60, and less than 1% were shown in professional or leadership settings.
Source: The Drum, multiple articles; Adapt Worldwide, ‘The Forgotten Bias: Ageism in Marketing’; AARP, 2019; CreativeX
If you’re pushing out the people who understand your most valuable consumer demographic, you’re not just losing talent. You’re losing revenue.
Mark Ritson’s analysis of the K-shaped job market reinforces the point. Senior and director-level roles held up through 2025, but the hollowing out of mid-career roles means the pipeline of experienced marketers is thinning. When combined with ageism that pushes out the over-45s, the profession is losing the very capabilities that AI cannot replace: judgement, relationship management, and strategic thinking.
Source: The Drum, Mark Ritson, February 2026
4.6 Industry initiatives: well-intentioned, not yet working
Several initiatives have attempted to address the problem. The Advertising Association’s All In action plan includes age diversity targets. The ‘40 Over Forty’ initiative, co-founded in 2020, celebrates professionals in media, marketing, and advertising who felt overlooked. Dentsu has introduced age-themed employee networks and menopause support toolkits. Rapp reports that 45% of its workforce is over 40, with 15% over 50.
Source: The Drum, ‘Ageism is a big problem in advertising’; ‘How do you solve a problem like ageism in the marketing business?’
But progress remains slow. Marketing Week’s longitudinal data shows that while the proportion of marketers aged 46–65 improved slightly from 14.5% in 2023 to 20.4% in 2024, the profession remains dramatically younger than the wider workforce. The structural incentives — cheaper junior hires, perceived digital fluency of younger workers, cost-cutting through senior redundancies — continue to push in the wrong direction.
Initiatives are welcome. What’s missing is urgency.
5. Key Statistics at a Glance
The table below summarises the key findings from across this briefing. If you take nothing else from this report, take this.
5. Key Statistics at a Glance
6. What This Means for You
6.1 This is structural, not cyclical
If you’ve been waiting for the market to ‘bounce back,’ stop waiting. The convergence of AI automation, chronic underinvestment in training, wage stagnation relative to competing sectors, and the hollowing out of junior and mid-level pipelines represents a permanent transformation of the marketing profession. As Ritson argues in The Drum, AI isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s driving a permanent reduction in the number of people needed to do this work.
6.2 The skills that will matter are the ones AI can’t do
Judgement. Relationship management. Leadership. The ability to sit in front of a CEO and make the case for a brand investment that won’t pay back for three years. The ability to say no to a bad idea when the algorithm says yes. Marketing Week’s data shows that almost two-thirds of respondents — and nearly three-quarters of CMOs — believe marketing strategy is undervalued. The profession knows the problem. The question is whether it will act on it.
6.3 The confidence crisis is real
Marketing Week’s 2026 Career & Salary Survey found that 13.6% of marketers now lack confidence in their skills, up from 9.9% the previous year. 85% have experienced imposter syndrome, with half reporting these feelings have intensified over the past year. Whether that’s a genuine skills deficit or a confidence gap driven by relentless technological change, it’s shaping how an entire profession views itself.
Source: Marketing Week, ‘‘Always in beta mode’: Marketers on bridging the confidence gap’, February 2026
6.4 Your most experienced people are your biggest asset — act like it
The profession is pushing out the marketers who understand its most valuable consumers, who carry the strategic judgement AI can’t replicate, and who have the experience to navigate exactly the kind of disruption the industry is facing. Replacing a 50-year-old CMO with a 28-year-old performance marketer and an AI subscription isn’t a strategy. It’s a gamble. And the data suggests it’s not paying off.
7. Frequently Asked Questions
We’ve compiled the questions that are most likely to come up when you share this briefing with your team, your board, or your clients. If we’ve missed one, the source index at the end has everything you need to dig deeper.
Isn’t this just a normal economic cycle? Won’t it bounce back?
No. That’s the critical distinction this time. Previous marketing downturns — the 2008 recession, the post-Covid reshuffling — were cyclical. Jobs contracted, then expanded again as confidence returned. What the data shows now is structural change. AI is permanently reducing the number of people needed to do marketing work. Forrester has upgraded its forecast from 8% agency job losses by 2030 to 15% by the end of 2026. When someone leaves a marketing team and the role isn’t replaced, that’s not a hiring freeze. That’s a role that no longer exists. Mark Ritson’s analysis in The Drum puts it plainly: The Great Stay is not a blip. It’s a new normal.
Is the skills shortage a UK-specific problem?
No. It’s global, though the data in this briefing focuses on the UK and US because that’s where the most robust longitudinal research exists. The WFA/MediaSense study found that 77% of respondents globally reported talent scarcity, peaking at 81% in the US and 93% in APAC. ManpowerGroup’s annual survey found that 74% of employers worldwide struggle to find the talent they need. In the US specifically, the Taligence 2025 Marketing Jobs Report found job postings fell 8% year-on-year, and the average marketing salary actually fell by 3%. This is not a regional issue — it’s an industry-wide one.
If there’s a skills shortage, why are so many marketers out of work?
Good question, and it gets to the heart of the paradox. The shortage isn’t in the number of people who call themselves marketers — it’s in the specific skills employers need. There’s no shortage of social media managers. What’s scarce is people who can do data analytics, performance marketing, marketing effectiveness measurement, and AI implementation. The market is simultaneously oversupplied with generalists and undersupplied with specialists. Add in the K-shaped dynamic — senior roles holding up while mid-level and junior roles disappear — and you get a situation where experienced marketers can’t find roles that match their level, and businesses can’t find people with the skills they actually need.
Why aren’t companies just training their existing people?
That’s the £319 billion question. Marketing Week’s 2024 survey found that 48.8% of marketers hadn’t been offered any upskilling opportunity. Only 11.2% of businesses had conducted a skills audit. The reasons are a cocktail of short-termism, budget pressure, and a ‘more with less’ culture that leaves no time or money for development. When 54.9% of your workforce is absorbing more responsibility without more pay, training becomes the thing that gets pushed to next quarter — every quarter.
Is AI really eliminating marketing jobs, or is that overhyped?
Both things are partially true, which makes this hard to navigate. The headline predictions — ‘AI will replace all marketers’ — are overhyped. But the gradual, quiet contraction is very real. HubSpot reports 74% of marketing professionals already use AI daily. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey found 12% of service firms had already reduced hiring because of AI. The impact is K-shaped: junior and mid-level roles are being absorbed, while senior strategic roles remain (for now). As Ritson wrote in The Drum, this is not a sudden explosion — it’s a year-on-year constriction that’s quieter and more corrosive than most realise until they try to find a new job.
What’s ageism got to do with a skills shortage?
Everything. The industry is losing its most experienced practitioners at exactly the moment it needs their capabilities most. 79% of UK marketers are under 45. Just 6.2% of the advertising workforce is over 50 — despite that age group making up 32% of the UK working population. Senior marketers are being made redundant, not replaced, and squeezed out through restructuring and a cultural obsession with ‘digital native’ credentials. Meanwhile, the skills the industry says it’s desperate for — strategic thinking, effectiveness, judgement, leadership — are exactly the ones that take decades of experience to develop. Pushing out the over-45s while complaining about a lack of strategic capability is, at best, contradictory. At worst, it’s the cause of the problem.
What should a CMO or CEO actually do with this information?
Four things, immediately. First, audit your team’s skills honestly — only 11.2% of businesses have done this, which means if you do it you’re already ahead of 89% of your competitors. Second, invest in training. Not a ‘lunch and learn’ — structured, funded development in the areas that matter: data, effectiveness, AI literacy. Third, protect your experienced people. The person in their late 40s who understands brand strategy, can read a P&L, and can push back on a bad brief is harder to replace than you think — and the data shows they’re being pushed out across the industry. Fourth, stop expecting the market to provide what you need. The talent isn’t coming. You have to build it.
Where can I read more?
Every statistic in this briefing is sourced from publicly available trade press and industry research. The full source index is on the next page. The two single best starting points are Marketing Week’s Career & Salary Survey series (published annually, with the 2025 edition providing the most current data) and Mark Ritson’s February 2026 column in The Drum on The Great Stay. Between them, they cover the skills gap, the job market collapse, AI’s impact, and the structural outlook for the profession. Both are behind paywalls, but both are worth paying for.
8. Source Index
Marketing Week (marketingweek.com)
• ‘Marketers point to data analysis as biggest skills gap’ – 1 March 2024
• ‘Skills gaps, restructures, outsourcing: 5 interesting stats’ – 18 March 2024
• ‘Marketing leaders on tackling the upskilling imperative’ – 4 March 2024
• ‘How is marketing recruitment shaping up in 2025?’ – 9 January 2025
• ‘More with less the tough reality for over half of marketers’ – 13 March 2025
• 2025 Career & Salary Survey series (March–April 2025)
• ‘Over half of brands facing marketing effectiveness skills gap’ – 22 April 2025
• ‘80% of CMOs concerned about AI skills gap’ – 7 April 2025
• ‘Over half of brands facing performance marketing skills gap’ – 8 April 2025
• ‘Why are marketing teams struggling to close martech skills gaps?’ – February 2026
• ‘‘Always in beta mode’: Marketers on bridging the confidence gap’ – February 2026
• ‘Half of B2B marketers grappling with AI skills gap’ – October 2025
• ‘79% of marketers aged under 45, study reveals’ – 23 July 2024
• ‘Almost three quarters of marketers aged under 45, study finds’ – 7 February 2023
• ‘‘Rudely interrupted’: How should marketers handle the industry’s ageism problem?’ – 20 February 2023
• ‘The big debate: Is age discrimination rife in the marketing profession?’ – 2017
The Drum (thedrum.com)
• Mark Ritson: ‘The Great Stay and the quiet collapse of the marketing job market’ – 9 February 2026
• ‘Are marketing execs still in a fight for talent?’ – 12 February 2025
• ‘Top marketers have realized low wages are causing tech talent drought’ – 1 February 2023
• ‘There’s a talent shortage. Freelancers are your friends, not foes’ – 8 January 2024
• ‘‘They’re missing development time’: agency bosses need to step up’ – 6 May 2022
• ‘We need to do more’: Ad Association launches task force amid talent crisis – 27 January 2022
• ‘Ageism is a big problem in advertising, so what are agencies doing about it?’ – 2021
• ‘How do you solve a problem like ageism in the marketing business?’
• ‘Ageism in ads: why are brands still failing to properly represent older women?’ – 10 December 2021
• The Drum Debate: ‘Is the advertising agency model dead?’ – 2024
Other Sources
• CIM/Hays Recruitment: Salary and Recruiting Trends 2025 guide (400+ marketing professionals)
• WFA/MediaSense: ‘Media’s Got Talent?’ global talent research, 2022
• ManpowerGroup: Annual Talent Shortage Survey, 2025
• Taligence: 2025 Marketing Jobs Report (240,000+ US listings)
• Robert Half: 2026 Marketing Job Market Report
• UK Office for National Statistics: Job vacancy and labour market data
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics: JOLTS data
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York: September 2025 survey
• Forrester: Agency automation forecasts
• IPA Agency Census: Average age and demographic data for UK advertising agencies
• Advertising Association: All In Census 2023
• Campaign magazine: Survey on ageism in advertising, marketing, media and PR
• WerkLabs: Survey on age-related discrimination in marketing
• AARP: Studies on representation of over-50s in media imagery (2019, 2021)
• Experience Advocacy Taskforce/AIC: Study on premature exits from advertising, October 2024
• Adapt Worldwide: ‘The Forgotten Bias: Ageism in Marketing’
• CreativeX: Analysis of 126,000+ ads on age representation