Pipeline 003: 'Head of' salaries rose 40% outside London. In London they didn't move at all.

Growth & Demand Gen

Morning. I have spent most of this week staring at salary data (I have no life, sue me) and it has put me in a mood.

Michael Page reckons "head of" marketing salaries in the North and the Midlands went up 40% in a year. In London they did not move at all. Sixty per cent of UK marketers say they are actively looking for their next job, against a national average of 50%, and of the 2,706 senior marketing jobs filled in the year from June 2025, seven in ten went to somebody from outside the business. So the money is moving out of London, the senior jobs are going to strangers, and most of us are already halfway out of the door.

Then Forrester counted CMO titles in the Fortune 500 and found 36% of them, down from 49% a year ago. That is thirteen points in twelve months. Even worse than my report twelve months ago. Aon asked a thousand employers whether they could explain their own pay decisions and 87% said yes, but only one in five has ever actually been asked to. So who is deciding what a senior marketer is worth now - and are they any good at it? The whole thing's a mess, and besides the CMO is all kinds of things these days anyway.

The Read

Senior salaries up 40% outside capital as London wages flatline

Careers · Molly Innes, Marketing Week, 17 September 2026

Michael Page's 2027 salary guide has "head of" roles in the North and Midlands paying 40% more than a year ago. London is flat. Creative director salaries outside London are up 40% too. Separately, Pearlfinders and Ingenunity+ data puts 2,706 senior marketing jobs filled in the twelve months from June 2025, with 70% going to external candidates. Sixty per cent of UK marketers say they are actively looking, against a 50% national average.

'It's hard to be a $7 billion company': The investment banker's diagnosis for ad tech's public woes

Industry · Seb Joseph, Digiday, 16 September 2026

Josh Wepman at Houlihan Lokey says the problem with public ad tech is not performance, it is size. Funds cannot put real money into an $800m market cap, so they do not. Around $14bn of ad tech deals have closed this year, across fewer transactions than before. Criteo is exploring a take-private. DoubleVerify, LiveRamp and Integral Ad Science have all moved off the public markets in 2026. The Trade Desk is down more than 80% since mid-2025 and faces removal from the S&P 500 this month. If you work in ad tech, your next owner is probably private equity.

Reach to cut editorial team by further 160 jobs as key metric becomes 'active engaged time'

Careers · Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette, 16 September 2026

Reach is cutting 220 editorial roles and creating 60, so 160 go net. Kent Live, Aberdeen Live and Galway Beo close. Editorial and production headcount has fallen from 3,369 in 2022 to 2,494 at the end of last year. Chief content officer David Higgerson says "active engaged time will become our north star metric, over and above page views". A publisher that size formally giving up on page views changes what you can buy from it, and changes what a content job there actually is.

Employers may not know how to explain their pay decisions, Aon says

Careers · Caroline Colvin, HR Dive, 17 September 2026

Aon asked more than a thousand companies whether they could stand behind their pay decisions. 87% said yes. Only 20% have ever handled a real or mock pay transparency request. A third have run a pay remediation analysis and 5% say the remediation is largely done. The biggest barrier named was managers not being ready to explain pay, at 43%. Aon sells pay transparency consulting, so the gap it found is also the gap it sells into. Still, ask your manager to explain your band and see what happens.

What happens to martech when the CMO disappears?

Careers · Frans Riemersma, MarTech, 17 September 2026

Forrester counted CMO titles across the Fortune 500 and got 36% for 2026, down from 49% in 2025. Marketing executives on the leadership team fell from 58% to 52%. McKinsey has 10% of Fortune 250 chief executives with marketing experience and 4% who held a CMO job. And 79% of CMOs say their KPIs line up with company goals, while only 30% say their organisation defines marketing ROI clearly. Riemersma runs martech research for a living, so read this as an argument rather than a survey.

Taboola Eyes The Finance Vertical With An Offer To Acquire Ad Network Dianomi

Industry · Allison Schiff, AdExchanger, 18 September 2026

Taboola has offered £19m to £27m in cash plus an earnout tied to publisher revenue for Dianomi, the ad network that places financial services advertising. Dianomi's publishers include Reuters, CNN Business, the Wall Street Journal and The Times. Its advertisers include Charles Schwab and Bank of America. Adam Singolda says the point is "an even larger, highly curated, trusted network of publishers". Expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulators and a shareholder vote.

More ads cut streaming brand recall from 41% to 26%, FreeWheel finds

Research · Luis Rijo, PPC Land, 18 September 2026

FreeWheel and MediaScience put 436 people in front of 30-second ads and tracked their eyes. At a light ad load, three minutes 45 in a half hour, unaided recall was 41%. At nine minutes in a half hour it was 26%. A single streaming exposure got 33% recall against 12% for the same ad in a social feed. 94% of people looked at the streaming ad, 75% at the social one. FreeWheel is owned by Comcast and sells streaming inventory, and the study finds streaming wins. Obviously.

One More Thing

Employers Are Changing Job Interviews To Catch AI Cheating, From Camera Pans To Hand-Wave Tests

Allwork.Space News Team, Allwork.Space, 1 September 2026

A Checkr survey of 3,000 managers found 59% suspected a candidate had used AI to misrepresent themselves. So Somos now asks candidates to pan the camera round the room and wave a hand in front of their own face. Passion.io binned take-home tasks and moved to live screen-shared writing. BrightHire built software that watches for browser tab switching. Nominal makes final-round engineers code in person on a company laptop.

I once did a phone interview while walking a dog that was not mine.

For the Commute

How AI Is Changing Talent, Not Just Tasks: Rethinking Where Human Judgment Matters Most

HBR IdeaCast · Adi Ignatius and Alison Beard with Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce · 17 September 2026

Goldman argues "human in the loop" is the wrong idea and wants "human at the helm" instead, people making the decisions that matter rather than approving machine output all day. The part that matters if you run a team is the entry-level bit. If AI eats the junior tasks, you have to redesign the junior job, not delete it. She is a Salesforce executive, so the examples are mostly Salesforce and its customers.

The Anatomy Of An AI Center Of Excellence In GTM

The Get · Erica Seidel with Audrea Madey, marketing leader at Rocket Software · 3 September 2026

Madey has built one of these inside a go-to-market team and talks about what it actually involves: training, enablement, and deciding who is allowed to use what. The hiring bit is the interesting bit. She now screens for curiosity and systems thinking rather than tool experience, which is a different interview to the one most of us are running.

Product Marketing

Morning. India has spent years teaching everybody to pay for things by QR code, free, every time. From 15 October that stops.

UPI did 24.51 billion transactions in August, worth about $312bn. Merchants taking more than 2,000 rupees in one go will now pay 0.4%, capped at 300 rupees. Consumers still pay nothing, and merchants are not allowed to pass the fee on, because the regulator has decided 0.4% is small enough to absorb.

Which is the argument every one of us has made in a pricing meeting - it is only a few per cent, they will barely notice. Except this one is running live on a rail that moves a third of a trillion dollars a month, and the person setting the price is not the seller. So who does own the price where you work?

The Read

India ends free ride for larger transactions on its ubiquitous digital payments network

Industry · Jagmeet Singh, TechCrunch, 15 September 2026

From 15 October, UPI charges merchants 0.4% on anything above 2,000 rupees, about $21, capped at 300 rupees. Railways, telecom, insurance and fuel pay a flat five rupees instead. Merchants taking up to 100,000 rupees a month are exempt. Consumers pay nothing and merchants cannot pass it on. UPI did 24.51 billion transactions worth 29.9 trillion rupees in August alone. Free to paid at that volume is the largest repricing anybody has attempted, and nobody selling on it had a vote.

AI makes a mess of the tech job market

Careers · Nidhi Sharma, HR Dive, 17 September 2026

Andela went through nearly 50,000 engineering adverts and found more than 53% of AI-focused postings asked for skills that did not match the job title. New titles keep appearing: LLM application engineer, docs-as-code engineer, lakehouse analytics engineer, FinOps reliability engineer. Cory Hymel, who runs research at Andela, says companies decide they need an AI engineer without knowing what one is, and end up "putting the wrong butts in the wrong seats". Andela sells engineering talent, so it profits from the confusion it is describing. If it is happening to engineering titles it is happening to yours.

No CMOs on top board of any FTSE 100 company, study finds

Research · Molly Innes, Marketing Week, 18 September 2026

Not one FTSE 100 main board has a marketing director or CMO sitting on it. In 2007 it was 14%. The research also found 70% of boards have meaningful marketing, customer or brand expertise somewhere, 45% have it beyond the chief executive, and around 10% of FTSE 100 chief executives come from a marketing or customer background. Fifteen of the sixteen consumer brands in the index do have board-level marketing expertise, so the gap sits everywhere else. The counting was done by The Marketing Directors, an agency with an interest in the answer.

Does anyone understand the CDP market anymore?

Industry · Mike Pastore, MarTech, 16 September 2026

BlueConic chief executive Melissa Murray Bailey argues the CDP category has rebuilt itself in eighteen months through AI agents and consolidation. BlueConic bought Jebbit and Blueshift. She says the old deployments were multi-million dollar, multi-year projects that sold features rather than outcomes, which is a fair description and also a description of what her own category used to sell. The phrase to watch is "agent-washing", vendors relabelling what they already had. This is a vendor chief executive defending her own category. Read it as that.

Enova scraps proposed Grasshopper Bank acquisition

Industry · Francis Bignell, FinTech Futures, 16 September 2026

Enova has withdrawn its applications to the OCC and the Federal Reserve, ten months after agreeing a $369m deal for Grasshopper. Chief executive Steve Cunningham says the company's growth does not depend on becoming a bank, and that regulatory guidelines "have not kept pace with the realities of meeting credit needs". The money goes into buybacks instead, $218m available under note covenants and $349m under board authorisation. Last week a fintech was buying a bank to get a charter. This week one gave up trying.

Inside the complex anatomy of agency AI bills

Industry · Kimeko McCoy, Digiday, 17 September 2026

Agency AI cost splits three ways: seats, tokens, and the people using them. Markacy runs enterprise Claude accounts for 25-plus staff at $20 to $100 a seat. Crispin runs around 100 enterprise AI tools and buys them on fixed annual fees on purpose, so the bill cannot surprise anyone. Ramp data says 31% of companies now spend more than $10,000 a month on AI. One agency is testing billing token costs back to clients as a separate materials charge. Markacy's Tucker Matheson: "I still need people who can get on a phone with a CMO and be impressive."

Italian firms face ad bans over AI-generated content offences

Industry · Luis Rijo, PPC Land, 17 September 2026

Legislative Decree No. 160 was signed on 9 September, published on the 15th, and takes effect on 30 September. Fines run €258 to €1,549 per quota. The part that reaches a marketing team is this: a company that benefits from putting out unlawful AI-generated or altered content can be banned from advertising for up to two years. There are prison terms too, one to five years for leaving the security measures off a high-risk AI system. Italy is first here. It will not be the only one.

One More Thing

Workers are flooding this ex-McKinsey consultant with bad-boss horror stories. He says they reveal a growing trust problem for HR

Kristin Stoller, Fortune, 31 August 2026

George Stern gets up to 20 submissions a day. One post about bereavement leave brought in roughly a hundred stories on its own, including a manager asking whether a grandmother counted as immediate family, and another complaining about the timing against a pitch meeting. Stern says corporations are losing trust like every other institution in the country. He also runs a business built on this material, so the supply of horror stories is his product.

I have never once won an argument about whether pineapple belongs on a pizza.

For the Commute

#828: Why Technically Correct Pricing Recommendation Can be Strategically Wrong with Sandeep Mathew

Impact Pricing · Mark Stiving with Sandeep Mathew · 14 September 2026 · 23 minutes

Mathew spent 19 years in global CPG, a lot of it at Unilever building revenue growth management. His argument is that the data looks at three to six months and brand equity takes ten to fifteen years to read, so a pricing recommendation can be technically correct and still be the wrong call. The promotion spiral section will be familiar to anyone who has watched a discount quietly become the price.

How to evaluate a PMM role before you take it

Product Marketing Life · Sharon Markowitz of YourCareerWings · 18 September 2026 · 21 minutes

Twenty-one minutes on the thing nobody warns you about, which is that scope, reporting line and decision-making authority vary so much between companies that one job title covers about five different jobs. She gives you the questions to ask in the interview to work out which one is actually being offered. If you are taking calls at the moment, listen to this before the next one.

The Money - London

London rounds from the past three weeks, and whether any of the money reaches a marketing seat.

Orchestra, $3.3m seed, led by Differential Ventures

Announced 1 September 2026. Moonfire, Breakers, Tokyo Black and Contour Venture Partners also in

A control panel for data pipelines and AI agents, founded in London by Hugo Lu and Will Davies. $4.6m raised in total. They are hiring a Founding Growth Lead, a founding account executive and an SDR all at once, so this money does reach marketing, and the whole commercial function starts from zero at the same time. The role is in Three Roles below.

Quartz, £2.75m pre-seed, led by Daphni

Announced 17 September 2026. Outward VC and K Fund also in, plus Philippe Gelis, who founded Kantox, and Gilles BianRosa, formerly chief product officer at N26 and Kraken

A consumer wealth app that pulls pensions, ISAs, savings and investments into one place behind an AI assistant called Charlie. In beta since early this year with over £10m of member assets tracked. Five roles open: three engineers, a financial adviser, and a Founding Growth Lead. The first commercial hire they are making is a marketer.

Resolutiion, $10.4m, led by Cherry Ventures and Octopus Ventures

Announced 14 September 2026. LocalGlobe and Auxxo also in

Fayola-Maria Jack's company reads the email and invoice traffic around a signed contract and flags a commercial dispute weeks before anyone files anything. Selling into defence, energy and manufacturing. Their job board runs on Deel and I could not read it, so I cannot tell you whether any of this is going into marketing. No claim either way.

HelmGuard, $7.3m seed, led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline

Announced 9 September 2026. FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First also in

AI agents that go and collect risk and compliance evidence instead of humans chasing questionnaires. Founded by John Daley and Jack Miller, out of Palantir. Three open roles and all three are engineering. There is no marketing hiring signal here at all, though Stage 2 Capital on the cap table is a go-to-market fund, which usually means a first marketing hire turns up eventually.

Bolter, $10m seed, funded by Improbable

Announced 10 September 2026. Improbable put the whole amount in on its own

AI-native business messaging. You describe a process in a group chat and the agents plan it, argue about it between themselves, and hand work to each other. Herman Narula coded the first version himself. No careers page and no roles listed, so there is nothing here for a marketer yet.

Seats - London

Rachel Swift is out at Virgin Media O2

Lucy Tesseras, Marketing Week, 17 September 2026

Executive director of brand and marketing, gone in a shake-up that also takes out the chief operations officer and the chief commercial officer. Marketing now sits under consumer chief executive Lyssa McGowan, who arrived in July from Pets at Home and spent a decade at Sky before that. Swift joined in 2024 from Tesco Mobile and led the "Essential For Living" repositioning. No successor named, so the chair is empty.

Andrew MacGillivray is leaving Thinkbox at the end of the year

Niamh Carroll, Marketing Week, 14 September 2026

CMO since 2011 and at Thinkbox for 21 years. A successor will be announced "in due course", which means one of the better-known marketing jobs in British media is about to be advertised.

Space NK has promoted its CMO to chief executive

Amrit Virdi, Marketing Week, 14 September 2026

Emma Simpson-Scott, CMO since April 2019, takes over from Andy Lightfoot after his seven and a half years. She joined in 2016 after nine years at L'Oréal. Marketing Week says it is not known who takes the CMO job now. So in one week London produced three empty senior marketing chairs and one marketer getting the top job. Both of those things are the same story.

The Money - New York

New York rounds from the past three weeks, and whether any of the money reaches a marketing seat.

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

Announced 2 September 2026. ICONIQ, Imaginary Ventures and co-chief executive Peter Rahal also in

The company behind David protein bars, the HallPass sweets brand and Epogee, with a third brand called Rowdy coming later this year. David launched in September 2024 with a single bar and is now in over 35,000 stores including Walmart, Target and Costco. Medici says it will pass $300m of revenue this year. They posted a Lifecycle Marketing Associate role in New York on the day the round was announced, and a Social Media Manager for HallPass nine days later.

Savvy Wealth, $100m Series C, led by Halo Fund

Announced 9 September 2026. Thrive Capital, Index Ventures and Goldman Sachs-backed Industry Ventures also in

An AI-native registered investment adviser. Independent advisers bring their client book and Savvy runs the technology, the compliance and the marketing behind it. $9bn of client assets and 150 advisers, double a year ago, at a $600m valuation. Two marketing roles went up in the New York office on 1 September, a Senior Product Marketing Manager and a Senior Manager for client marketing. Neither publishes a salary.

Highstock, $30m Series A, led by Andreessen Horowitz

Announced 10 September 2026

A marketplace where brands quietly move surplus stock to vetted wholesale buyers, handling the matching, the logistics, the payments and the paperwork. Over $1bn of inventory listed and more than 100 brands. The founders came out of Instacart. There is no marketing role, but there is a Growth Lead for new verticals working directly with the chief executive at $140,000 to $250,000, which is in Three Roles below.

Evvy, $40m Series B, led by Catalio Capital Management

Announced 15 September 2026

At-home vaginal microbiome testing moving into fertility, with over 100,000 patients and 3,000 clinicians. Founded in 2021 by Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek and Pita Navarro. There is a VP of Marketing seat open in New York, but it went up on 18 May and is still open, so it is not a post-round hire. It is a job nobody has managed to fill in four months.

Footprint, $25m Series B, led by QED Investors

Announced 16 September 2026. MUFG, Commerce Ventures, Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and BoxGroup also in

AI-native compliance for financial crime: know-your-customer, anti-money-laundering, sanctions screening. The stated plan for the money is to double engineering and sales. Not marketing. Eleven roles open and not one of them is a marketing job. If you were hoping a fintech Series B automatically means a brand hire, not this one.

Tare, $13.25m seed, led by Blockchain Capital

Announced 16 September 2026. Janus Henderson, Strobe Ventures, Neoclassic Capital and the Avalanche Foundation also in, plus angels including Aave's Stani Kulechov and Tether co-founder Phil Potter

A Brooklyn company putting private credit loans onto blockchain rails, with a second office in Lisbon. I could not find a careers page anywhere, so treat the hiring signal as unknown rather than absent.

Seats - New York

Mark Weinstein has left Hilton for Target

Target press release, 14 September 2026

Weinstein was global CMO across Hilton's 28 brands and head of luxury brands, for more than sixteen years. He is now Target's chief marketing and guest experience officer, reporting to chief executive Michael Fiddelke, effective immediately. Hilton has not named a successor, so a global CMO chair is open.

Emma Chalwin leaves Workday for Accenture

Accenture newsroom, 8 September 2026

Chalwin becomes Accenture's chief marketing officer on 1 October, reporting to chair and chief executive Julie Sweet. She was chief marketing officer at Workday. Which leaves the Workday seat open too.

EliseAI is advertising three senior marketing seats at the same time

All three verified live on 19 September 2026

Chief Marketing Officer at $300,000 to $450,000, posted 5 February. VP of Marketing at $275,000 to $350,000, posted 17 October last year. VP of Growth at $275,000 to $350,000, posted 27 July. All New York, all still listed, all published bands. EliseAI raised a $250m Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz. Three open seats above the line at one company for that long is either a very hard brief or a very hard boss.

Three Roles - Growth & Demand Gen, London

Founding Growth Lead, Orchestra

London, three days in the office · £60,000 to £80,000 plus equity · advert live on 19 September 2026

First marketing hire at a company that closed a $3.3m seed on 1 September. SEO, content, paid, the website and events, and you write the blog posts and the LinkedIn posts yourself. They are hiring a founding account executive and an SDR alongside you, so the whole go-to-market function starts on the same day. Four years' experience wanted. No sponsorship available.

Founding Growth Lead, Quartz

London · salary not published · advert live on 19 September 2026

The pre-seed closed two days ago. Five roles open, and the other four are three engineers and a financial adviser, so you would be the entire marketing function of a consumer fintech at launch. The product is in beta with over £10m of member assets tracked. No band published, which at pre-seed usually means they want you to open.

Growth Marketing Lead, Diversification, Cleo

London, one day a week or more in the office · £70,980 to £93,026 · advert live on 19 September 2026

Paid acquisition for Cleo's newer products, Chat and Cards, and things not launched yet. You manage and mentor people who are already there, with an explicit plan to grow the team. SQL is in the requirements because you will be in the data. A published band, a real team to run, and SQL in the requirements.

Three Roles - Growth & Demand Gen, New York

Founding AI Growth Marketer, Dioptra

New York, five days in the office · $160,000 to $240,000 base plus equity · one of mine

Dioptra is a legal AI agent for contracts. Y Combinator and Engineering Capital backed, five people, an Icertis company, with JPMorgan Chase and Nestlé already buying. You would own growth end to end and report to co-founder Farah Gasmi. The unusual part is that they want you building your own fleet of AI agents to run growth experiments, not just running the channels. The seat is meant to grow into leading the team. This is one of mine, so you can discount my enthusiasm accordingly.

Performance Marketing Manager, Ramp

New York, hybrid · salary not published · posted 14 September 2026, live on 19 September

Paid acquisition across YouTube, ChatGPT, X, rideshare and Reddit, plus finding new channels that work. Running ChatGPT as a paid channel is not a line many people have on a CV yet. Ramp does not publish a band on this one, which for a New York advert is a decision rather than an oversight.

Growth Marketing Manager, DualEntry

New York, on-site · $160,000 to $210,000 base plus equity valued at $50,000 to $75,000 · posted 25 August 2026, live on 19 September

An AI-native ERP with more than $100m raised from Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, Contrary and GV. You own the budget across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit and X. One thing to know before you apply: their Head of Marketing advert went up on 31 January and is still up, so you may well arrive before your boss does.

Three Roles - Product Marketing, London

Head of Product Marketing Management, UpSlide

London, three days in the office · salary not published · advert live on 19 September 2026

Reports to the chief product officer, inherits one product marketing manager, and is expected to grow the team. UpSlide builds the document production layer for financial services inside Microsoft 365, selling to investment banks and private equity. Five stages including a case study, so clear an evening. No band published and the form asks for your expectations, which means they want you to go first.

Senior Leader, Product Marketing, Multiverse

London, hybrid · salary not published · advert live on 19 September 2026

Four product marketers already in the team and you would run them, reporting to the chief product and technology officer. Multiverse does AI and tech apprenticeships with more than 1,500 employer partners. Eight years in product marketing and two managing people. It is a leadership seat rather than a senior individual role wearing a leadership title.

Product Marketing Lead, CreativeX

Remote, London or New York · $160,000 to $200,000 base · advert live on 19 September 2026

Company-level positioning and messaging rather than launches alone, plus competitive intelligence and sales enablement. CreativeX sells creative measurement and governance into large marketing organisations, so you would be marketing to marketers. They want eight to ten years and a portfolio that proves you can write. Highest published band on this list by a distance.

Three Roles - Product Marketing, New York

Product Marketing Manager, Viktor

New York, Warsaw or remote US · $190,000 to $250,000 · one of mine

Founding product marketer at a company with $75m from Accel and $30m of ARR inside four months. Viktor is an AI coworker that sits in Slack and Teams and does actual work. You would report to the founders, own positioning across several very different buyers, run every launch end to end, and write the battlecards against Glean, Harvey, ChatGPT Enterprise and Cognition. Four to eight years. This is one of mine.

Product Marketing Manager, DualEntry

New York, on-site · $175,000 to $280,000 base plus equity valued at $80,000 and up · posted 24 August 2026, live on 19 September

Messaging and competitive positioning aimed at finance chiefs and controllers, launches end to end, and you would lead the content, copy and design teams while still writing yourself. The band is high for a product marketing manager title because the job is bigger than the title. Same caveat as the growth role there: the Head of Marketing seat has been open since January.

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Housing, EliseAI

New York, on-site · $170,000 to $210,000 · posted 14 September 2026, live on 19 September

The advert says the company is still fully determining its mature product positioning strategy, and that this person's work will directly influence how customers understand the identity of EliseAI. That is a lot of room at Series E. It also means the positioning is not settled, which you can read as an opportunity or as a warning depending on how your last job went.

Seven in ten senior marketing jobs went to an external hire. When did you last see somebody promoted into one where you work?

Gareth