Marketing Briefing: What happens to marketers when the cultural ‘cheat code’ of TikTok is gone?

The common answer from agency executives is that, at least in the short term, marketers will have to work harder to understand what’s trending, where their brands can fit into the conversation and the audience insight work that TikTok has added some ease to. “It is a cheat code in a way,” Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO of brand studio Kingsland, said of marketers’ use of TikTok to understand culture in recent years. “My recommendation is that brands should always have a platform agnostic culture strategy.”

“Unfortunately, brands and agencies who have depended on TikTok as their source of ‘cultural insight’ will struggle,” Leila Fataar, founder of brand consultancy Platform13, wrote in an email. “Being culturally relevant is not easy — it takes care and consideration.”

While marketers will certainly look to the platforms that people migrate to and spend their time on, there’s no clear indication yet that audiences will migrate to one app and with that move give one platform the kind of cultural power that TikTok has amassed. Instead, marketers and agency execs expect that, should TikTok be shuttered, social media will only fragment further, with some spending more time on Instagram Reels, others on YouTube Shorts, others on Twitch or Discord or Reddit. Culture is “amplified” on the short-form video alternatives but it isn’t created in the same way it is on TikTok, explained Laura Brand, executive director of social at VML, adding that “2025 is going to be much more about the decentralization of social.”

Without that “cheat code,” marketers will have to use many platforms for research, and will also likely resume or increase their efforts in more traditional audience research methods like customer surveys and in-person research trips at physical stores.

“TikTok is a cultural force and amplifier that has become a mainstay, but most sophisticated marketers look at multiple cultural indicators to understand trends and decide how to incorporate them into a campaign strategy,” Gabe Gordon, CEO of Reach Agency, wrote in an email. “Not only do I believe that the trend forecasters and trendsetters will continue to do just that, but I anticipate that they’ll be inclined to lean into that ability more heavily without TikTok.”

While that will help, losing access to TikTok for creative inspiration and research is something strategists and creatives aren’t thrilled about.

“Obviously we do our own research but TikTok delivers this beautiful nuance because it’s a platform where people just spew their honest, original thoughts all the time,” said Evan Carpenter, group strategy director at Mother New York. “The ability to get really insightful about an audience, understand them and understand their motivations via content that’s constantly being posted to that platform, if that’s gone … I’ll miss it.”

While other platforms certainly provide inspiration in similar ways — a Reddit insight led to one of last year’s best Super Bowl campaign’s (CeraVe’s Michael Cera campaign) — TikTok has been a “central nervous system” of culture, explained Mani Schlisser, director of strategy at Oberland. “The jokes, the memes, the trends, the movements, the creators, they don’t all just migrate to one platform. That’s not how culture works,” Oberland said.

Should the ban happen, it will take time to understand how people migrate and what that will mean for brands in culture. Until then, the industry waits.

3 Questions with Jamie Berger, svp of marketing for mobile game MonopolyGo!

Monoply Go! is approaching its second year in business, growing its live event investment to get in front of more people. How’s that going?
Over the past year [2023-2024], have run three different country tests of TV in the U.K., in France and Canada. In each one of those, we tried various mixes of both — what you would consider traditional TV and live sports, or live events. What we found is that having a meaningful investment in live sports can really increase the value of the media spend.

What learnings came out of the live event spend?
What we saw with live sports and the general media mix is not only did it lift the new installs, but also made our digital investment more effective. This is maybe one of the most important elements of the campaign, is that it not only worked on its own for the sake of the TV and the diverse media bringing in people into the game, but it actually made the KPIs of our traditional digital media spends better.

Does the increased spend on live events take away from the performance marketing budget?
The answer is we are still figuring that out. Over the past year, we’ve gotten more and more aggressive — and this is certainly the most aggressive in terms of the investment — but what we don’t see is taking our foot off the gas on digital performance. We know it works and we understand the KPIs and we understand the value. As we go into [2025] and beyond, we’re going to learn more about what the percentage mix should be. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

These days, brands are increasingly looking to more authentically embed themselves in cultural trends, becoming the watercooler moment as opposed to just advertising them. For example, consider the “very demure, very mindful” trend that sparked last fall. Brands like Netflix, Zillow and Lyft hired the trend creator, TikToker Jools Lebron, for campaigns. However, it’s a balancing act as new research from Sprout Social, a social media management platform, points out. Per the research, one in three consumers say it’s embarrassing for brands to hop on trends. See key details from the research below: — Kimeko McCoy

• Consumers say the most important traits of brand content are authenticity and relatability.
• Further, 46% of consumers say original content makes their favorite brands stand out online.
• 81% of consumers say social media drives them to make impulse purchases. 73% say they’ll buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.
• 93% of consumers think that brands need to combat misinformation more than they do today.

Quote of the week

“Entertainment is a loyalty program.”

— Matt Rotondo, head of brands at Sugar23, when asked about the appeal of building out brand studios and how 2024 laid the ground work for brand studios that may start to pay off this year.

What we’ve covered

• What it takes to go viral: How internet stars like Bogg Bag capitalized on TikTok fame
• Ban anxiety triggers TikTok execs to rethink their next moves
• Here are the cases for and against AI agents