Monday Briefing: TikTok Has a New Owner. Now What?

January 26, 2026 | Behind the CMO

Good morning, it's James here. After a year of will-they-won't-they drama, TikTok finally has new owners. The question every CMO should be asking this week isn't whether to keep spending there. It's whether the platform you've come to depend on is about to become something else entirely.

(Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

The Lead: TikTok's New Owners Are Here. The Real Test Starts Now.

A year after Congress passed the law that could have killed TikTok in the U.S., the platform announced Thursday that a new American-controlled joint venture has officially taken over (CBS News).

The ownership structure: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will serve as managing investors with a combined 45% stake. Eight additional investors, including Dell CEO Michael Dell's personal office and Susquehanna International Group, hold another 35%. ByteDance retains 19.9%, squeaking just under the 20% cap mandated by law.

Why CMOs should care: The deal creates uncertainty where there was certainty. TikTok's algorithm, the secret sauce that made it the most effective discovery engine in social media, will be "retrained" using only American user data. Oracle will review source code on an ongoing basis. For marketers who've built entire strategies around TikTok's recommendation engine, this is an open question mark.

The platform lost key advertising executives Blake Chandlee and Jack Bamberger in recent months (Digiday). Marketers who watched X's tumultuous ownership transition are paying close attention.

The take: TikTok is still projected to generate $17.17 billion in U.S. ad revenue this year. The platform isn't going anywhere. But the next 90 days will tell us whether we're looking at a stable transition or X 2.0. Smart CMOs are keeping their budgets flexible and their contingencies ready.

Platform Watch

Google opens a new ad category. On January 21, Google began accepting ads for prediction markets, a category that was strictly prohibited for years (Search Engine Land). The catch: only CFTC-authorized exchanges and NFA-registered brokers can participate. This is Google dipping a toe, not diving in. But it signals a growing comfort with regulated financial products that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Google's AI shopping push gets real. At the National Retail Federation conference, Google unveiled its "agentic commerce" suite, including a Universal Commerce Protocol that lets retailers offer personalized deals directly within Search and Gemini, a Business Agent that lets shoppers chat with brands like a virtual sales associate, and Direct Offers, a pilot letting advertisers serve exclusive deals inside AI Mode (Google Blog). Translation: Google wants to own the entire shopping journey from discovery to checkout, and AI is the vehicle.

Musical Chairs

Sonos brought in Colleen DeCourcy as CMO this month to lead a brand turnaround after a rough 2024. DeCourcy is Adweek's "Creative Leader of the Decade" from her time running Wieden+Kennedy, where she led the agency to three Agency of the Year honors. She joined Snap as chief creative officer in 2022 before taking the Sonos role. When a company in crisis hires one of advertising's most decorated creative leaders, it's a signal they're serious about the rebuild (Ad Age).

Teads named Dani Cushion as CMO, effective January 6. Cushion comes from Innovid, where she helped position the CTV company for its acquisition by Mediaocean. She also guided Cardlytics through its IPO. The omnichannel ad platform is betting her track record of building marketing engines at high-growth companies can help reset its positioning (Globe Newswire).

The Reading List

• "The Definitive Guide to What's In and Out for Advertising in 2026": Digiday's annual take on where the industry is headed. Key signal: we're entering a "quadropoly" structure, and outcomes-based buying is replacing the billable hour.

• "100 Ad Leaders Predict 2026 Marketing Trends": Ad Age's comprehensive forecast. The stat that should concern you: nearly two-thirds of shoppers now use AI models for product research instead of search.

• "After Watching X's Ownership Issues Play Out, Marketers Brace for TikTok Whiplash": The essential read on what the TikTok transition means for ad budgets.

• "For Brands and Agencies, AI Exits the Pilot Phase in 2026": Adweek on why the experimentation period is over. Now it's about what scales.

One More Thing

The platforms keep consolidating power. Google wants to own your shopping journey. TikTok's new owners want to prove they can run the algorithm better than ByteDance. Meta's AI is learning from your conversations to serve you better ads.

The question for CMOs isn't which platform to bet on. It's how much of your strategy you're willing to build on land you don't own.

See you next Monday. Until then, stay nimble.

—James