At the operating board, only 17 have a marketing director (or equivalent title).
"The results show that marketing professionals are struggling to get their voices heard inside the offices of the country's leading businesses," said Christine Cryne, chief executive of The Chartered Institute of Marketing, which carried out the research.
"Marketers need to make that extra effort to educate colleagues and gain recognition about what they do. They need to demonstrate that marketing is increasingly a science and much more than just t-shirts and pens.
"Once the message gets through that marketing can bring real positive differences to the bottom line, and show a healthy ROI, I'm certain that marketers will find themselves actually setting the board room agenda."
"The alarming news is that the vast majority of the top 100 firms do not have marketing directors even on the second tier operating board," says Cryne.
"The exclusion of marketing personnel from the board rooms is a serious cause for concern, not just for FTSE decision makers, but the marketing profession itself."
The web-based research excludes non-executive board members.
The 11 with a Marketing Executive at the main board were BP plc, BPB, British Airways, Imperial Tobacco, Legal & General, Marks & Spencer, W Morrison, Rentokil Initial, SAB Miller, Tesco plc and Vodaphone Group.
