Pipeline 001: seven in ten senior marketing jobs went to an outsider

Growth & Demand Gen

Right, it's the first one of these, so I've gone a bit numbers-heavy. Seventy per cent of senior marketing hires in the UK this year went to somebody from outside the company - real Pearlfinders data, 2,706 hires, not a survey about how people feel about hiring. So if you've been told the internal candidate always wins, here's the number that says otherwise.

Except - and this is the bit that got me - a third of Fortune 500 companies have dropped the CMO title entirely in the last year. Not the job. The job's still there. Just not called that anymore. ASOS did the same thing last week - lost its top marketing seat, and it's come back as EVP Customer & Commercial, not CMO. CFO's covering it till they sort someone out.

Anyway. Wayve wants its first ever Head of Marketing, and Cognition's opening its first seat outside the US right here in London. So somebody's still hiring.

The Read

Seven in ten senior marketing jobs went to an outsider

Careers · Molly Innes, Marketing Week, 17 Jul

Exclusive Pearlfinders data on 2,706 senior UK marketing hires in the year to June. Seventy per cent went to external candidates, and 64% of the 298 C-suite appointments did too. Financial services was the most open to outsiders at 81%, then charities at 79.4%. HSBC made 15 senior hires, BT Group and Lego 14 each.

Manager roles have overtaken entry level in the US market

Careers · Taligence, 4 Aug

An analysis of 86,628 live in-house US marketing listings. Manager and Senior Manager is now the largest segment of the market, having passed entry level for the first time. Junior listings fell 16.4% in a single quarter while Director and above rose 17.3% year on year. Median advertised salary hit $95,004, up 11.8%, though part of that rise is simply junior roles disappearing from the mix. Worth knowing: Taligence is a recruitment firm, so this is them marking their own homework a bit.

The great CMO rebrand

Org Design · Cecilia Garzella, Campaign US, 5 Aug

Only 36% of Fortune 500 companies still use the CMO title, down from 49% a year earlier. The share of marketing executives on the exec committee or reporting to the CEO has fallen to 52%, the third annual decline in a row. UPS, Etsy and Walgreens have removed the standalone title, folding marketing under COOs or chief commercial officers.

How to restructure your team and budget for AI search

Org Design · Jason Shafton, Search Engine Journal, 31 Aug

Shafton opens with the question that stalls planning calls. Which budget line owns whether ChatGPT recommends you? Usually nobody's. When he tests a client's twenty highest-intent buyer queries across the main assistants, page-one rankings turn out not to protect them, and one Series B client with fourteen page-one keywords appeared in four of twenty answers. His fix needs no new headcount - the SEO lead picks up AI search and owns entity consistency across the site, LinkedIn, G2, Crunchbase and Reddit.

Airtable: the SaaSpocalypse and a hail mary

SaaS · Ajit Ghuman, Monetizely, 17 Aug

A pricing post-mortem on Airtable's sale to Bending Spoons for $1.285bn cash on 4 August. That's roughly 2.7x its $480m ARR, and about a tenth of the $11.7bn it was worth in December 2021, despite growing 20% plus with 80% of the Fortune 100 as customers. Ghuman's read: Airtable rebuilt the product around agents but never got round to repricing the actual product underneath it.

AI is making SaaS expensive to run, and the numbers are showing

SaaS · Mia Osmonbekov, Fortune, 12 Aug

Canva has cut its expected revenue growth rate by a third, to 20%, and slowed its AI rollout to rebuild the architecture underneath it. Figma shows the same squeeze, with free cash flow margin falling to 14% in Q2 from 27% in Q1 and Q3 growth guidance dropping from 48% to 36%. Analyst Derek Hernandez put it plainly: AI is making SaaS no longer a zero marginal cost business.

The AI wrote the ad copy and sales went down

Research · Marketing Science Institute, Feb

Six months of randomised field experiments with a cross-border e-commerce platform, putting generative AI into seven customer-facing workflows, with up to 13.7 million people in a single test. A pre-sale service chatbot lifted sales 16.3% and query refinement 2.9%, while AI-written push messages came out at 1.6% and were not statistically significant. AI-written Google ad titles trended negative, at minus 4.5%. It's an academic working paper with almost no press pickup, so you'll be early on this one.

One More Thing

The logical end point of AI job interviews is two bots talking to each other

Kate Taylor, WIRED, 2 Sep

A jobseeker called Christopher has sent roughly 700 applications in six months and heard almost nothing back. An AI recruiter named Riley keeps cold-texting him. After five interviews with Riley produced not even an automated rejection, he pointed ChatGPT Voice at it and let the two of them interview each other for ten minutes, at which point they got stuck in a loop about onboarding and background checks. He calls it a slop flywheel. I found this very funny and slightly harrowing.

For the Commute

What CMOs talk about behind closed doors

CMO Confidential · Maryam Banikarim · 11 Aug · 36 min

Banikarim's a five-time CMO and chairs the WSJ CMO Council. Given the title's vanished from a third of the Fortune 500 in a year, her real question - do senior marketers still even want the top job - feels a lot more live than it used to.

Why AI should drive growth, not just efficiency

Uncensored CMO · Najoh Tita-Reid · 19 Aug · 55 min

Tita-Reid left one of the biggest jobs in marketing to go and learn about AI properly, and argues most organisations are deploying it purely to cut cost when the actual prize is growth. Her worry: marketers who only use AI to cut cost stop being the ones setting strategy. This is the version of the AI argument that works in a room with a CEO in it.

The Money - London

London rounds from the past three weeks, and what each one actually looks like from a marketing seat.

Callosum, $100m seed, led by Atomico

Systems software routing AI workloads to the cheapest viable model and chip combination. First cheque out of the UK Sovereign AI Fund, and one of the largest UK seeds on record. A company at this stage with this much money has to build a marketing function from nothing, quickly.

FNZ, $450m

Wealth management platform for banks and asset managers, over $2.5tn of assets on it. The money's earmarked for technology, people and products, so keep an eye on their board.

Mindgard, $30m Series A, led by Album VC

AI security: shadow-AI discovery, red teaming and runtime protection. Nothing on the careers page yet. Categories like this usually can't avoid a demand gen hire for long - you've got to teach the market before you can even start selling to it.

Prevalent AI, £16.1m, led by Integrity Growth Partners

Enterprise data fabric for security operations. Hiring across engineering and managed services. No marketing roles posted.

Reapit, £20m+, growth investment from Accel-KKR

Property tech for estate agencies, 92,000 agents on the platform. Private equity cash into a business like this usually means somebody's about to get squeezed on efficiency, not handed more headcount.

Seats - London

ASOS's top marketing seat is open

Ben Blake left as EVP Customer & Commercial on 31 August in a senior team restructure. CFO Aaron Izzard is covering the remit until they find a permanent replacement.

Craig Inglis moves to Teal Group as Group Chief Customer Officer

The former John Lewis CMO picks up customer, marketing, licensing and brand across the group that owns The Entertainer. He's also handed the chair of The Marketing Society to Jeff Dodds, CEO of Formula E.

David Sandström is leaving Klarna

Out after nine years, alongside the CFO. Klarna's now recruiting a New York based CFO to sit closer to investors, post IPO.

The Money - New York

New York rounds from the past three weeks, and what each one actually looks like from a marketing seat.

Icon, $30m, led by Founders Fund

AI admaker turning brand assets into finished performance creative, plugged into Meta Ads Manager. The most on-topic company here, and there's an open Founding Growth role on the careers page today. Reported from the SEC filing rather than a press release, so treat the number as indicative.

Medici Brands, $250m Series B, co-led by Greenoaks and Valor

The high-protein CPG house behind David bars and HallPass candy. A quarter of a billion into a consumer brand business means paid, lifecycle and creative hiring. Several NYC marketing roles are already listed.

Cityblock Health, $116m Series E, led by General Catalyst

Brooklyn based value-based care, raised alongside acquiring Homeward Health to push into rural care. An acquisition plus a new market usually means somebody has to own member growth.

Blank Street, $105m Series C

The small-format coffee and matcha chain, funding West Coast expansion at around $650m. Honest note: I checked the board and all 83 open roles are café operations. Not a growth hiring signal yet.

Aligned Marketplace, $20m Series A, led by Venrock

Connects self-insured employers to independent primary and specialty care practices across all 50 states. Has a real marketing function and an open Member Growth & Engagement role, NYC metro hybrid.

Seats - New York

Kohl's folds the CMO role into a Chief Customer Officer

Arianne Parisi moves from Chief Digital Officer into a new role owning marketing, digital, loyalty and personalisation, reporting to the CEO. CMO Christie Raymond leaves in September. It's the third time I've seen this exact reshuffle this quarter - the CMO title folded into a broader customer role rather than just replaced.

Dan Kleinman moves to Athletic Brewing as CMO

From nearly a decade at Deutsch Family Wine and Spirits. He arrives as Athletic lifts national media spend 120% and signs a MetLife Stadium partnership. A budget expansion story, which is rarer this year than it ought to be.

David Sandström is leaving Klarna, and there's a New York angle

Out in early 2027 after nine years, alongside the CFO. Klarna's also recruiting a New York based CFO to sit closer to the investor community, post IPO.

Three Roles - Growth & Demand Gen, London

All three verified live. None of these are mine - I have no London roles on at the moment, sorry, I'm working on it.

Head of Marketing · Wayve

London · salary not published

Wayve's first Head of Marketing. You inherit a team of four and get to write the positioning for a company that's raised over $1bn from SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft, and has to explain autonomous driving to carmakers, regulators and the public at the same time.

Head of EMEA Marketing · Cognition

London · salary not published · posted 31 August

The founding marketing hire for a whole continent at the lab behind Devin - brand, demand gen, partner marketing and events, working alongside the EMEA Country Head instead of underneath a marketing hierarchy.

Performance Marketer · Lovable

London · salary not published

A senior IC role where the job is to build AI agents inside Lovable itself to run your own paid budgets. Europe's fastest growing AI company, standing up a new London hub with five growth roles open at once.

Three Roles - Growth & Demand Gen, New York

All three verified live against the employer's own job board.

Director of Growth · Terial

NYC, Flatiron · $120,000 to $185,000 + equity

First dedicated marketing hire, reporting straight to the CEO, building the demand engine from zero. The market is AI workflow automation for commercial roofing contractors, which is the sort of deeply unglamorous category where growth marketing still has real white space.

Demand Generation Lead · Rogo

NYC · $175,000 to $265,000

AI for investment banks and private equity firms. An explicit zero to one mandate, building and owning the demand engine from the ground up. Also the highest published demand gen range I've seen this month, by some distance.

Demand Generation Lead · Attio

NYC · $185,000 to $225,000 + equity

Attio has raised $116m from GV, Redpoint, Balderton and Point Nine, and is deliberately building its first mid-market and enterprise ABM motion on top of a product-led business. You'd be building the motion, not just running one that's already built - a different job to the usual demand gen hire.

Before you go

If you're open to a new role at the moment, talk to me. https://discord.gg/SJWgYzyez is our discord server, you are more than welcome (please don't share this, you have been carefully selected, even though the broadcast nature of this email may not make it look that way!)

Gareth