The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing

The recent surge in job listings for “narrative engineers,” “UGC engineers,” and “media engineers” on LinkedIn has sparked a debate about the rebranding of marketing roles in the tech industry. Beneath this trend lies a broader pattern: how work is named, coded, and valued.

Marketing has long been associated with women, who make up 67% to 70% of practitioners in the industry. Research shows that as a profession becomes associated with women, its pay and status tend to decline. This phenomenon is not unique to marketing; numerous studies have demonstrated that cultural stereotypes about who is good at what kind of work drive these patterns.

The marketing industry’s broad church has been flattened into something specific by decades of cultural shorthand. TV shows like Sex and the City and Emily in Paris have perpetuated the “marketing girlie” trope, portraying marketers as women and gay men throwing parties and coming up with zany ideas. In contrast, the tech bro stereotype is that of a hyper-optimized lone wolf genius.

These stereotypes have economic implications. The perceived value of a profession, the language used to describe it, and who is seen to be performing it are intertwined. For example, before “software engineer” was a job title, coding was a secretarial task mainly done by women. Margaret Hamilton coined the term “software engineer” in an effort to get her work taken seriously.

The tech industry’s rebranding of marketing roles is not unique; similar patterns have played out in other professions. Changing language has a habit of changing who feels welcome. Research shows that women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel qualified or, in other words, welcome.

As AI commoditizes coding and technical creation, the tech industry is forced to admit that marketing actually matters. However, “marketing” comes with baggage – decades of cultural coding have made it a hard sell internally. The solution? Dressing it up in clothes they feel comfortable wearing.

Tech has a penchant for taking familiar ideas and selling them back as revolutionary. Marketing is just the latest iteration of this trend. 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.

The irony is that AI is automating the technical parts faster than anything else. Creative intuition, human judgment, and taste are still the hardest things to replace. Yet 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.”

However, this raises questions about what we’re actually trying to achieve here. Are we genuinely looking to create new roles that require technical skills, or are we simply rebranding existing jobs to fit the tech industry’s mold? The answer matters because it will determine whether these changes bring more women into leadership positions in marketing or just perpetuate a cycle of tokenism.

Ultimately, this is not just about marketing or even the tech industry. It’s about how we value work and who feels welcome at the table. We need to have an honest conversation about what skills are truly valuable in today’s economy and stop pretending that everyone can be a “narrative engineer” or a “growth architect.”