A client asked me two weeks ago what we should do about the Facebook algorithm next year. I told her I did not know, and that Facebook does not know either, and that this was the single most useful thing I could give her before the holidays.
Run the year back. March, Cambridge Analytica. April, Zuckerberg in front of the Senate explaining the business model to men who did not want it explained. May, GDPR. July, a quarter of the market value gone in a single day. September, fifty million accounts and the access tokens, and the Instagram founders gone within the week. October, Google+ shut down over a bug that had sat undisclosed since spring. This month, Tumblr erasing a decade of communities in a policy note.
Nothing on that list is a marketing story. All of it is.
No brand gets to rent its audience anymore, because the landlord keeps changing the locks and calling it a product update.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms for years, and the standing advice was always some version of go where the people are. That was correct when the platforms were stable and cheap. It is now a plan that depends entirely on decisions made by companies currently under subpoena. Reach you do not control is not an asset. It is a lease with no term and no notice period.
Which does not mean abandon the platforms. It means stop counting them as equity. An audience you can reach without permission is the only audience you actually have. Email lists, phone numbers, a physical room, a shop, a subscriber file. Unglamorous, slow to build, and nobody else's to revoke.
An audience you can reach without permission is the only audience you actually have.
Patagonia rewrote its mission statement this year down to one sentence about saving the planet. That lands because the company spent forty years building direct relationships with people who would follow it to a plain text file. Glossier is the interesting counterweight, a brand built almost entirely on Instagram, which is a spectacular result and also a bet on somebody else's roadmap. Both are real strategies. Only one of them survives a bad quarter at a company you have never met.
So the question I would take into January is not which platform to prioritize. If the largest channel you rely on vanished on a Tuesday behind a two line blog post, how many of your customers could you still reach on Wednesday. Write the number down. For most brands I have worked with it is smaller than anyone wants to say out loud.
Barnaby spent the entire year asleep on top of the router and has no opinion on any of this, which is either indifference or the correct amount of trust in infrastructure. I am going to Powell's. See you in 2019.