Owned versus rented: the platform dependence risk hiding in your marketing stack

For most of the past decade, the smartest place to spend a marketing dollar was on someone else’s platform: Meta, Google and, more recently, TikTok. They offered targeting, reach and measurability older channels could not match, and the returns justified the spend. 
That arrangement is quietly getting more expensive and less predictable. Cost per acquisition keeps climbing, algorithm updates can reshape organic reach overnight, ad accounts get suspended over opaque policy calls with n