Scott Cunningham’s Take On How A Cookie-less Future Will Impact Local TV
In this interview from CES 2024, Founder of Cunningham Tech Consulting Scott Cunningham predicts how, with the desecration of cookies in 2024, local TV and advertising will have to evolve.
Scott Cunningham: You know, it's interesting. On the local side, there's a couple of different elements of local. There's the owned and operated, when it comes to national brands. There's a large issue when it comes to national brands buying local, and it has everything to do with how local is really hard to work with, especially local holding companies – hence my project with NewsPassID is the aggregation network of that. Buyers, if you think about wanting national brands and agencies working with local, the other challenge candidly is then when the cookies do go away, how do we measure across that ecosystem when you've got multiple identifiers being set up in that infrastructure?
Local buying – a lot of publishers, obviously are using local SMBs for audience extension – they're faced with very similar prospects. And okay, well, how do we do lookalikes? How do we [do] reach extension? What's going to happen in Q4 this year? You're going to have local and national media planners going, "What's my privacy sandbox look like? What does my UID2 connection look like? What does my Amazon world look like?"
We're walking into what media planning is going to be. It’s not going to be holistic based on anything more than some of these very specific concrete channels being set up. And I do think that the local SMB buying is going to be very similar, but as we know, it tends to fall a little bit further behind than the national buy; they're not as sophisticated out of the gate. So this is going to be a learning curve. I actually think there's going to be a lot of volatility here in Q3 and Q4, but come next year, people are going to have a lot of learnings, and they're going to go correct in Q1 of 2025 on what we found out and how this transition is going to happen.
