Top marketing skills in 2024 (June)

Creative and Production skills see huge increase in demand

Major brands have invested heavily this month in agencies with Creative and Production skills, our latest report has shown. This briefing area has jumped up the table from 6th place in May to 3rd in June, representing a volume growth of 2.4%.

We’re an agency/client matchmaking platform, monitoring real-time briefs we receive from chief marketing officers (CMOs) and brand owners. This information gives us a unique perspective on what’s hot and what’s not that month – information which is then distilled into our monthly Marketers Most Wanted report.

The Creative and Production Design category has seen a staggering level of demand this month, making up 8.7% of the briefs coming into the StudioSpace platform. This demand is made up of brands approaching StudioSpace for support on larger multi-channel marketing campaigns.

“Brands have come to us looking for a fresh approach to both the creative and production elements of big campaigns,” said StudioSpace CEO Pete Sayburn. “Examples we’ve seen have included a large insurance company looking for an exciting creative for their 2025 TV & Digital campaign, and a large automotive company looking for alternative suppliers for the production element of their upcoming marketing campaigns.”

Social and Content continues to dominate brand briefs

This month the number of briefs requesting social media and content support reached its highest ever figure, with the category retaining its 1st place position. In June, 21.1% of briefs coming into our platform were Social and Content-oriented, compared to last month’s 19.8%. The specific areas of support have varied this month, with requests ranging from content strategy to specific campaign development, to organic retained support.
This category has topped our table for five of the last six months, and though we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future, it still remains exciting to see the types of requests in these briefs.

UX/UI Design retains its second place position

Despite a number of other category shifts, UX and UI design briefs have held strongly onto their 2nd place position on the table. This is particularly interesting as a result of the 1.7% decrease in volume over the past month, leaving it tied with Creative and Production at a solid 8.7% volume share.

This decrease in demand is explained by a dip in requests for design to support completely new initiatives, though the volume briefs requesting ongoing UX/UI support to complement in-house resources have remained relatively stable.

“We’re continuing to hear that many internal UX/UI teams are simply maxxed out, and at the same time brands are struggling to recruit top talent in this area. This explains the continued popularity of this category in our reports, as businesses look to outsource in order to delivery quality work without compromising on delivery timeframes,” says Sayburn.

Software Development briefs drop to make room for table shifters

Claiming 4th position on our June Marketers Most Wanted is Software Development, a one position drop from the month before. This category represented 7.7% of our total briefs this month. This is the first month it has fallen out of our top three since October!

This month, as with May’s report, we’ve seen brands mostly searching for ongoing support for existing projects, with less demand for new software development endeavours. Types of projects falling under this category usually include app creation and website development.

Software Development’s volume drop makes room for a number of other categories with rising demand. One such category is Research and Insight, which this month has rocketed to fifth position, representing 7.7% of briefs.

“We’re seeing a spike in demand for proposition/new territory testing as brands look to gain confidence in new initiatives through quantitative and qualitative research,” affirms Pete.

In this category we’ve also seen demand for segmentation projects as brands look to better understand their target audiences and tailor their experiences and content accordingly.

Another winner this month is Digital Marketing, which has jumped from 9th place to 6th, with growth from 5.2% to 7.7%. Example business challenges in this area include a digital campaign to test and learn how to grow in the US market, as well as specific cross-channel digital campaigns.

Position drops from two categories this month

Software Development is not the only category to have seen a position drop in June’s report. Our SEO and PPC category has fallen from 5th to 8th place this month, despite a 0.4% increase in volume. This type of brief has fluctuated on our table every month since the beginning of the year so we’ve definitely started to expect the unexpected.

Similarly, Copywriting has seen a fall on the table, though this was accompanied by a decrease in share from 6.3% last month to 4.8% this month. Like SEO and PPC, this category continuously fluctuates, and we expect this to continue to occur as these projects tend to be relatively small and often dependent on in-house capacity.

In 10th place on our table this month is the Proposition Design category, a non-mover since May’s report. It has, however, lost volume share, now representing 3.9% of briefs, compared to 4.2% last month. It will certainly be interesting to see if this category moves up the table again as brands look for external help to explore new territories, or whether this is a lasting downward trend with more of this work continuing to be done in-house.

“June has certainly been an exciting month for our Marketers Most Wanted report, with plenty of movement and some unexpected position changes. Will our usual top three categories reclaim their positions next month, or will creative and production briefs continue to grow in popularity? It’ll be interesting to find out,” concluded Pete.