Marketing teams at Fortune 500 companies are increasingly relying on freelancers and contractors, who now make up between 30% and 70% of many marketing organizations.
Companies including Delta, MassMutual, ServiceNow, and Colgate are moving away from hiring single contractors to assembling teams of freelancers and external specialists for ongoing work across multiple quarters.
The shift marks a significant departure from before 2022, when freelancers typically made up about 10% of enterprise marketing teams and were used primarily for short-term, tactical tasks.
The new findings come from workforce platform Assemble, which rebranded from Publicist this week. Founded by Lara Vandenberg in 2020, the company has built a network of more than 50,000 senior marketing freelancers and works with Fortune 500 CMOs and agencies.
Assemble’s 2025 revenue grew 400% year-over-year, according to Vandenberg, who said the name change reflects a broader shift in how enterprise marketing teams are operating: increasingly assembling modular, specialist teams rather than only making permanent hires.
“Marketing is in a productivity cycle, not a hiring cycle,” Vandenberg said in a statement. “CMOs are responsible for output, speed, and efficiency simultaneously, and the traditional agency and permanent headcount model cannot consistently deliver all three.”
The freelance shift
The growth of freelancers in marketing mirrors a wider trend in the U.S. labor market. The U.S. freelance workforce has nearly doubled over six years, from about 38 million in 2020 to 76.4 million today, representing about 40% of the American workforce, according to data from Upwork.
Professional services — specifically marketing, creative, and communications — are the fastest-growing segment of the independent workforce, according to the MBO Partners 2024 State of Independence report.
Meanwhile, 61% of marketing leaders plan to increase their use of contract or freelance talent this year to bridge skills gaps in areas like AI-enabled workflows and marketing automation, according to Robert Half’s 2026 outlook.
Assemble said it is seeing growing demand for freelancers in roles like process optimization and creative technology, driven in part by companies shifting to AI-enabled workflows. Post-production roles, by contrast, are on the decline.
