Scroll through LinkedIn, and you will find a flurry of new job listings with curious titles: “Narrative Engineer”, “UGC Engineer”, “Media Engineer.” At first glance, they sound like entirely new disciplines. Look closer, and they feel suspiciously familiar.
As someone who has built a decade-long career in the marketing industry, I wondered: Why are these marketing roles being relabeled? I took my question to social media. “Is marketing being rebranded so boys can do it too?” I quipped on TikTok between meetings.
I checked back a few hours later, and my comments section was aflame with marketers, tech folk, and VCs. Some had sensed something was off but couldn’t quite name it; others shared the most absurd titles they’d come across; and some pushed back, arguing that something genuinely new was emerging.
The tech bro-ification of marketing is underway. It’s not the first time a profession has been repackaged like this. But beneath this trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded, and valued. The question: why is this happening to marketing—and why now?
Part of the answer lies in who marketing has come to be associated with. According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 67% to 70% of marketing practitioners are women, making it one of the few female-dominated fields in the corporate sector. Research consistently shows that as a profession becomes associated with women, its pay and status tend to decline, and marketing is no exception. Plenty of professions skew one way or another, but those patterns aren’t driven by biology but rather our cultural stereotypes about who is good at what kind of work.
The marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific. Shows like Sex and the City and, more recently, Emily in Paris have portrayed marketing as women and gay men throwing parties and coming up with zany ideas. Over on social media, this has calcified into the “marketing girlie” trope: the personality hire who makes things pretty in Canva and forces her boss to do TikTok dances. The cliché of a tech bro, by contrast, is that of a hyper-optimized lone wolf genius. These are stereotypes, but they have economic implications.
The perceived value of a profession, the language used to describe it, and who is seen to be performing it have always been intertwined. Before “software engineer” was a job title, coding was a secretarial task, mainly done by women. Cosmopolitan even ran an article in 1967 titled The Computer Girls, touting it as an ideal career for women. Software was “soft” work versus the “hard” work of building physical things. Even Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist at NASA in the 1960s, described feeling like a misplaced “stepchild” among the hardware engineers.
Hamilton coined the term “software engineer” in an effort to get her work taken seriously, much to the amusement of her almost exclusively male colleagues. Yet through the 70s and 80s, “software engineering” emerged as a bona fide profession: well-paid, prestigious, and over time, predominantly male.
There were many different forces responsible for the shifting demographics of the software engineering profession, but it is undeniable that changing language has a habit of changing who feels welcome. Research has shown that women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel they are 100% qualified or, in other words, welcome.
The same dynamic is now playing out in marketing in reverse. In consumer brands, marketing has always been a core discipline. I would argue Nike’s most valuable asset isn’t the technical spec of a sneaker, but the story around it. However, in Silicon Valley, the hierarchy works differently: those who build sit above those who sell. Except now the very thing they’ve relied on for growth—coding and technical creation—has been commoditized by AI.
The first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste. “Taste is a new core skill,” declared OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make,” pronounced technologist Paul Graham.
As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put it: AI makes it easier to build new products, so distribution is the biggest challenge facing consumer technology businesses.
The truth is that taste, distribution, and marketing have always been important. But now that AI is cheapening other kinds of work, tech has been forced to admit that marketing actually matters.
The problem is, “marketing” comes with baggage. Decades of cultural coding have made it a hard sell internally, so tech is dressing it up in clothes they feel comfortable wearing. Brand strategists become narrative engineers. Marketing managers become growth architects. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Tech has a penchant for taking familiar ideas and selling them back to us as revolutionary. Taxis become Ubers, bed and breakfasts become Airbnbs. Marketing is just the Emperor’s latest outfit.
In some cases, these roles are genuinely becoming more technical, but mostly the language is being stretched so thin it’s hard to separate reality from corporate fiction. Just like using a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, using vibe coding and automation tools doesn’t make you an engineer. Marketing has always been part science, part art. The irony is, AI is automating the technical parts faster than anything else. Creative intuition, human judgment, and, yes, taste, are still the hardest things to replace. Yet still, employers reach for technical language to signal value.
Perhaps the upside will be that job titles with a technical veneer could command higher salaries and more respect from leaders who respond better to “engineer” than “marketer.” The problem, though, is the more we conflate value with tech, the more we devalue the art of marketing and the people who practice it.
It might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern. When you control the vocabulary of a field, you decide who deserves a place. Tech has always been good at making familiar ideas feel like breakthroughs, and marketing is just the latest one.