Mark Ritson opened his session at The Drum’s Predictions event by arguing that marketing has a habit of wildly overstating change. Strip away the noise, he said, and 2026 would look “dramatically like 2025,” to the point that if marketers looked back a decade from now, it would be “borderline impossible” to tell the two years apart.
But once he had cleared that ground, Ritson went on to make one prediction that cut through any lingering complacency in the room. The marketing jobs market, he argued, is heading into its toughest period in memory.
“I predict this is the year it becomes more and more apparent that people are not going to want to ever leave their current marketing role,” Ritson told the audience.
This, he stressed, is not because marketers have suddenly become less ambitious or less capable. Instead, he argued, a growing number are arriving at the same, concerning conclusion.
“The main realization that is striking many marketers who are switched on is, if they leave their current marketing job, they won’t be able to get another,” he said.
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Some of the slowdown in movement, he suggested, is practical. Many marketers secured flexible working arrangements during the pandemic and are reluctant to give them up. But the deeper issue is mobility and the growing belief that opportunities are drying up.
That belief, Ritson argued, is being reinforced by two overlapping forces. Fewer people are leaving their roles and the overall number of marketing jobs is quietly shrinking.
“I think we’re seeing now a significant realization that whatever else AI is doing, it’s slimming down the number of people required to do marketing roles at this stage. It’s still minor [but] we’re chipping away at the number.”
The effect on hiring, he added, is already clear. “It has always been tough to get a decent mid-to-senior level marketing role. But if you talk to anyone who has been out there for more than six months, it’s apparent that it’s absolutely horrendous out there and it has never been worse.”
That tightening job market is inseparable from Ritson’s view on artificial intelligence, though not in the way much of the industry currently frames it.
Throughout his career as MiniMBA educator and columnist, including for The Drum, Ritson has built a reputation for challenging what he sees as marketing’s endless appetite for hype. Over the years, he has been openly skeptical of technologies and trends that promised to revolutionize the industry and failed to deliver.
“All the other horseshit revolutions in marketing, I’ve been openly disparaging about. The metaverse, for example, was a big bag of piss.”
But AI, he argued, is different. “I think this is a revolution,” he said, though with a hefty caveat.
For Ritson, the industry’s fixation on AI-generated advertising misses the point. It says more about marketing’s obsession with advertising than it does about the technology itself. Advertising, he reminded the room, should represent only a small proportion of marketing activity.
“I don’t think the main interest in AI has got anything to do with advertising.”
Where AI is already having a tangible impact, Ritson said, is in research and data, particularly through the rise of synthetic data. Generated through AI models rather than gathered directly from consumers, synthetic data is already outperforming traditional research in consistency and predictive accuracy, he argued.
“Consumers are notoriously fickle beasts at explaining their own behavior,” he added, pointing to how survey results can vary dramatically depending on methodology and framing. Properly built synthetic models, by contrast, are producing stable results that often align more closely with real-world outcomes.
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The implication for marketing teams is uncomfortable. If insight and research can be produced faster, cheaper and more reliably with fewer people, then fewer people will be needed to do that work. The effect on headcount may be incremental, but it is already influencing how marketers think about their careers.
Ritson was careful to stress that AI has not yet delivered its biggest impact on marketing. He does not expect strategy development or brand planning to be fundamentally transformed in the next year. 2026 will, as he said, still look much like 2025. Those changes, he said, are coming later.
For now, the impact is quieter, but no less significant. “No one with any kind of decent radar is going to leave their role. And that just makes the situation worse.”
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