the job market has been awful for marketers for almost 2 years now
Which, coincidentally, is how long AI tools have been available to the mainstream.
Marketing director here. AI will allow fewer people to do more work, mainly more technical work.
This wouldn’t be the first time marketing is streamlined either. In my email marketing department, I went from hiring HTML coders, copywriters, graphic designers, and SQL programmers to just hiring marketers because our automation platform streamlined all of that work. Targeting, design, copy, and coding is all done through better user interfaces, and I pivoted my headcount to people who can work on strategy.
In the immediate future, I think AI will be a great aid for things like media buying and foundational work, but I don’t see marketers going anywhere anytime soon.
I think the tough market right now is because whenever the economy struggles, marketing usually struggles.
My recommendation would be to learn how to leverage AI as a tool rather than a threat.
@Vale
I’ve been doing lots of tests buying DeepAI credits directly.
Also testing lots of different tools for content generation.
@Vale
Do you mind sharing the platform? (Unless it’s built in-house maybe)
I’m late to the party, but I pivoted a year ago and left marketing and tech. I was a Director of Content in my last position. Now I’m a reseller/antique dealer. We go to garage sales, flea markets, thrift stores and flip stuff on platforms like eBay. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s like being a suburban Indiana Jones. Tech is fucked. I’m not going to lose my job in my 50s and have to work at some crappy local company doing sales or customer service. So now I can use my marketing skills in other industries. Going to branch out to starting other businesses as well to generate more income. Don’t bet on tech.
@Niall
Thanks, I’ve already applied to Law Enforcement and Fire Dept. I’d rather make less and have a stable job I don’t need to worry about at this point.
I will do marketing and my own websites on the side.
Certainly not every company is that AI savvy.
I think my relatively small employer is pretty AI aware and AI isn’t taking jobs here. I would put it on my resume if I was looking for a new marketing job.
Big companies in big cities might be different, but it’s definitely not an across-the-board type of thing.
What were your core responsibilities in your previous role as director?
Bootstrapped tech companies tend to inflate their job titles to compensate for lack of pay/stock options. If you were a director but still working on content production, I can tell you now why you haven’t found a new director job for a year.
Also, how old are you to call this the worst job market ever? Not trying to be a dick, I’m actually curious.
I think AI is helping in not hiring extra marketers to do basic tasks but not completely eliminating the need for marketers. The economy is very unstable right now. Interest rates are high. Inflation overall is high. The market is not good.
Worse.
There are fake zombie job posts all over. At my friend’s job, several marketers are overworked and an extra 4 or 5 marketers would help, but the company isn’t trying. They lie saying they’ll hire more in the next month so people can keep grinding thinking there’s hope (there isn’t) but just post fake job postings with no intention of hiring anyone.
I was shocked to learn that hundreds of companies statewide do the same, and it showed up in my local news since it’s getting out of hand. Nothing is done about it.
Fake hope to people applying and fake hope to overworked employees. Not seriously considering anyone at all is screwing everyone over. Over a year and a half of lies. My friend quit—they didn’t replace her either; just piled the work onto the other poor marketers to save more money.
@Keagan
Ghost jobs make it seem like the company is growing. 
No. AI that I saw sucks hard right now. Some days it seems like, oh wow, look how it improved. Other days it’s just wasting my time having to fix the stuff AI is doing. So the answer is a hard no from me anyways.
No, I think it’s just the market. There are still leaders who want their teams to lean into AI, but the smart ones just want it for automating the more mundane tasks. The minute you try to ‘replace’ human intelligence with AI, there are consequences. Think of all the websites that saw major drops in traffic after Google started penalizing AI content.
None that are worth having.
Definitely in social. At my previous agency, I was doing audits of leads and found 7 out of 8 used ChatGPT. Currently looking for new work and feel it’s only going to get tougher due to automation now, despite the downsides of it.
@Zayden
Well, social media is dying, so it makes sense companies are just pushing out garbage from AI.