By this time next week, we’ll likely know (though, anything could happen) whether TikTok has gone dark in the U.S. or if the app will continue to exist. So far, it’s not looking good. The likelihood of a ban has creators uneasy, preparing their audiences to follow them on other platforms and hoping to take brand deals elsewhere. Meanwhile marketers are questioning refunds, readying contingency plans and sorting out where they’ll move ad dollars.

It seems, all things considered, that marketers are prepared for the short-order effects of a TikTok ban should that come to fruition. What remains up in the air, however, are the long-term effects for brands should TikTok be rendered unusable in the U.S. Sure, there are other short-form video alternatives that stand to benefit (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels) but short-form video wasn’t the only appeal of the platform. TikTok has been a cultural spigot of sorts for marketers in recent years — they’ve looked to the app not only for what’s trending and to tap into those trends but to understand potential audiences and various cultural niches. So what happens when that spigot is shutoff?

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 fi t 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 astheir 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 moretime 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 aboutan 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 “centralnervous 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.