New research has revealed the hefty salaries being paid to marketers and creatives at some of the biggest ad and tech companies in the world.
Business Insider in the US commissioned the study (you can read its full reporting HERE) based on data out of the US that requires companies to reveal the salaries of staff that are hired from overseas and require a H1-B visa to work in the States.
The research revealed that although there had been layoffs at the height of the pandemic in 2020, jobs in the advertising and marketing space had rebounded strongly and were up 3.2 per cent from a year ago. Again, these numbers are all based on the US market.
Here’s what Business Insider discovered when it came to salaries for media and marketing employees for some of the top tech and ad companies. All numbers are in US dollars.
WPP
Sir Martin Sorrell recently bemoaned that top New York ECDs were commanding salaries as high as $5 million a year when, Sorrell suggested, it was the far less paid digital and data specialists who were the future of the ad industry.
However, according to Business Insider’s research Sorrell’s figures appeared a somewhat exaggerated. It found the going rate for planners and strategists was $180,000 and for senior creatives the figure moved to $200,000 annually.
PR proves a top payer
PR specialists in areas such as data, crisis management and healthcare were in big demand.
The research revealed that senior PRs were commanding $280,000 a year, while execs at the top PR firms were on as much as $500,000.
Apple
The world’s first three trillion dollar company isn’t slack with employee salaries either. Case in point, its CEO, Tim Cook, just became a billionaire (again, that’s US dollars.)
According to Business Insider, a senior marketer at the company can command a salary of $325,000 annually.
Netflix
Apparently, Netflix never makes a profit and the business model is all based on its booming share price.
That said, it doesn’t pay its employees performance bonuses, just large salaries instead.
Based on the data, Netflix offered annual base salaries ranging from $68,000 to $850,000, with a median of $345,000, for various roles.
Snap
According to reports, Snap (the company behind Snapchat) has been aggressively recruiting of late in areas such as AR, short-form video and new content.
That said, it appeared the worst of the companies profiled when it came to salaries. The data finding the average salary for staffers in the sales or marketing department were paid at a starting rate of $78,000 up to $110,000 per year.
Direct-to-consumer startups
With online sales exploding during the pandemic, the research revealed that direct-to-consumer startups were in desperate need of marketers.
Companies such as Peloton and Grubhub were paying $132,000 for a marketer and as much as $231,000 for a senior director of brand marketing.
