James Mulvey

Creative strategists reach leadership faster than typical marketers but 58% still say they're underpaid.

That's the tension in our State of Creative Strategy 2027 report from 1,195 practitioners and 1,400+ job postings.

AI keeps broadening the scope of the role but the pay hasn't kept up.

US median base pay is $70K for ICs, $90K for managers, and $135K for directors.

Our research found that . . .

Specialization is no longer the safe career bet.

Employers want it all. Creator skills, strategy, design, editing is expected from day 0, even for junior hires.

Full report: runneth.com/research/state…

If you're trying to hire a cracked marketer, the report will give you salary benchmarks, scope guidelines, and advice on retaining the best talent right now.

🚨🚨🚨🚨

Dropping everything to go claim Runneth’s profile.

Other AEO tactics we’ve found to work:

1) LinkedIn content is indexed like crazy, we’ve built media pages for this reason

2) Creating agent-specific versions of our research reports and content for every launch

3) plain text “for your agent” sections to help agents sell to other agents

We've had 10K people on our livestreams and 160K people signed up for our virtual events this year.

But we still needed to figure out how to adapt the playbook we've perfected for virtual events to IRL.

At our Chief Marketer SF event, I think we nailed it.

"If it works in paid social, it can work anywhere."

Ads + email are the two big revenue channels. So why aren't they talking more?

- Top ad hooks = new subject lines
- Top statics = new email headers
- Top angle = your new sales email

this gives me faith in AI as a tool for creativity.