{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/marketing-managers/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Marketing Managers",
    "soc_code": "11-2021",
    "category": "Management",
    "us_employment": 395240,
    "median_annual_wage": 166790
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 40,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 8,
    "embodiment": 4,
    "liability_shield": 2,
    "trust_premium": 11,
    "judgment_accountability": 15
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "An 8 reflects the split in an actual week: the brief-writing, A/B copy variants, audience segmentation, competitor teardowns, and monthly performance decks are already produced at usable quality by tools your team has licenses for, while the parts that hold the score above 6 — negotiating budget reallocation mid-quarter with a CFO, deciding to kill an underperforming channel, and running a launch war room across sales, legal, and product — still require a person in the room with the authority to say yes.",
    "embodiment": "A 4 is the floor for a role that is executed in Slack, Figma comments, Google Analytics, and a CRM, with the only physical component being trade show booths, shoot days, and photoshoot supervision — presence that is occasional, scheduled, and in controlled venues rather than a daily condition of the job.",
    "liability_shield": "A 2 acknowledges that nothing stops an unlicensed person from holding this title: there is no board, no exam, and no personal exposure — FTC substantiation and Lanham Act false-advertising claims land on the company, and AMA or PCM certification is a résumé line, not a legal requirement to approve a campaign.",
    "trust_premium": "An 11 comes from the relationships that are genuinely yours — the agency AE who takes your call, the sales VP who trusts your lead quality numbers, the CEO who believes your read on the brand — but the campaigns themselves ship under the company's name to audiences who never learn who ran them, which keeps this out of the 13+ band where the buyer is buying the individual.",
    "judgment_accountability": "A 15 is earned by decisions that have no correct answer available in the data: committing seven figures of spend to a channel mix before attribution can confirm it, approving a brand repositioning that the market may reject, and choosing whether to respond publicly to a competitor's claim or a social backlash — calls that get named in a post-mortem and attached to your headcount at the next planning cycle."
  },
  "rationale": "Marketing managers spend much of the week on work AI already does at usable quality: campaign briefs, copy and creative review, competitor scans, segmentation, funnel dashboards, and performance write-ups for leadership. What survives is owning the budget, choosing which bets to place with incomplete data, managing the team and agency relationships, and absorbing the blame when a launch or brand decision goes wrong. There is no license and no physical component, so the whole moat is accountability and internal political capital — which shrinks the headcount rather than the role, as smaller teams with AI tooling cover the same output.",
  "outlook": "Expect fewer marketing manager seats overseeing much larger AI-assisted output, with the surviving roles concentrated in budget ownership, brand-risk judgment, and cross-functional deal-making.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift is genuine here: once brief-writing, copy review, competitor scans and reporting are absorbed by tooling, the residual day is budget allocation across channels with contradictory attribution data, agency negotiation, and crisis/brand-risk calls. Watch for job postings that drop 'content calendar' and 'reporting' entirely and list P&L ownership and vendor management as the core scope — that is the same role scoring higher on judgment work.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Substantiation and disclosure liability attaching personally to a named marketing officer. Concrete hooks in motion: FTC Endorsement Guides revisions and the 2024 rule on fake reviews, state 'AI disclosure in advertising' bills (e.g. California AB 2013-style provenance and political-ad AI disclosure laws), and EU AI Act transparency duties for synthetic content. If an FTC consent order or state statute requires a named human to attest that AI-generated claims and testimonials were substantiated — as pharma already does via medical/legal/regulatory review sign-off — the role acquires a signature requirement.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Narrow route only: buyer-side procurement clauses requiring named human accountable leads. Watch for ANA (Association of National Advertisers) media-transparency contract templates or large advertiser MSAs specifying that a named human, not a model, approves final creative and media plans, and for 'no AI-generated talent likenesses' terms of the kind SAG-AFTRA's 2023 commercials contract introduced. This raises trust premium for agency-side marketing leads specifically, not for in-house generalists.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Already near ceiling at 15. Modest additional route: boards and D&O insurers treating brand/reputational and AI-content incidents as named-executive risk, e.g. audit-committee reporting lines for marketing AI use, or insurer questionnaires asking who signs off on synthetic media. That formalises existing blame-absorption into documented ownership.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Even with every lever, this caps around 55-60. The core problem is not that the role disappears but that headcount compresses: liability and accountability moats protect one named senior person per organisation while the associate and specialist tiers beneath them thin out. No licensure body exists or is being proposed for marketing, so liability_shield cannot approach the levels seen in accounting or engineering."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 218970,
        "wage": 132230
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 240440,
        "wage": 134290
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 263680,
        "wage": 136850
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 270200,
        "wage": 142170
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 278690,
        "wage": 135030
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 328570,
        "wage": 140040
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 368940,
        "wage": 157620
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 384980,
        "wage": 161030
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 395240,
        "wage": 166790
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 80.5,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}