A client emailed me at eleven on a Wednesday night with a subject line that read, in full, 'is this real.' Attached was a story about a federal national security review of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. She had approved a six month content plan the Friday before. Every deliverable in it lived on that app.
I wrote back that I did not know, because nobody does. Then I went to bed and thought about it until two.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. She did nothing wrong. TikTok is where the attention is right now, the organic reach is absurd next to Instagram, and the creative her team is making there is the best work they have done in years. Building on it was the correct call.
The mistake was not building on TikTok. The mistake was building only on TikTok, with nothing underneath it.
Every platform you build on is a landlord, and none of them will tell you before they raise the rent or sell the building.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms for a decade and the pattern never changes. Vine had brands with millions of followers and six second production pipelines, and then Vine was simply gone. Facebook told publishers to pivot to video, publishers laid off writers, and the video numbers turned out to be wrong. The platform never carries the risk. You do.
So, three things. One, know which of your assets you actually own. The email list, the customer data, your own site, the relationships with the fifteen creators who make your stuff. Those survive a shutdown. Followers do not. Two, treat platform native format as rented creative, not as your brand. If your voice only works with that app's sounds and that app's captions, you do not have a voice, you have a costume. Three, write the contingency down before you need it. Not a crisis plan, just one page. If this app disappears in ninety days, where does this audience live and how do we reach them without it.
That last one takes an afternoon and no client has ever wanted to pay for it.
If your voice only works with that app's sounds and that app's captions, you do not have a voice, you have a costume.
None of this means slow down on TikTok. Go faster. Just do it with the exits marked.
I sent her the one page version in the morning. Truffles sat on the keyboard for most of the writing, which is roughly her level of concern about platform risk, and Barnaby was asleep in a laundry basket. Neither of them has a contingency plan. Neither of them needs one, because I am the platform, and I am not going anywhere.