• by Colin Kirkland , September 30, 2025

As the Trump Administration works to finalize a long-awaited deal with China regarding the launch of a U.S.-based version of the TikTok platform, Scott Sutton, CEO of influencer marketing company Later, is helping his clients strategize for the future. 

“No matter what, the new TikTok will be different than it is today, which is the biggest threat and opportunity for brands, vendors, and creators in the space,” Sutton tells MediaPost in an exclusive interview. 

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order describing the terms of the deal to transfer TikTok to U.S. ownership. The administration is currently waiting for China to approve the terms of the deal, which state that a joint-venture company will oversee TikTok’s U.S. business, as ByteDance keeps less than a 20% stake.

Under the terms of the deal, Oracle will use ByteDance technology to retrain the TikTok algorithm for U.S.-based users, with Congress and the Supreme Court overseeing the rebuild. Private-equity firm Silver Lake, as well as the Abu Dhabi-based MGX investment fund have been listed as investors. 

Beyond these facts, however, is a long list of questions tied to how this massive change could impact the way brands, vendors and creators use the app for business. 

What will a national social media platform look like?

Will U.S. TikTok users lose their national audience?

Will creators’ engagement histories disappear from the interface? 

Will creators double down on U.S.-centric content?

How will brands shift their targeting strategies?

Will vendors give up on TikTok Shop? 

To help gauge answers to these questions and more, MediaPost turned to Sutton, who provided insights into the state of TikTok and the ways in which advertisers can still prepare for the unknown. 

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

MediaPost:  How much have you been discussing this deal with your clients?

Scott Sutton:  Not as much as I would have expected. Everyone went through a fatigue phase regarding the state of TikTok. Now that we're getting some clarity, we’re starting to have more pointed conversations with brands, vendors, and creators about some very real potential consequences.

MediaPost:  What is Later doing to prepare for a new U.S.-owned TikTok?

Sutton:  We have already created internal strike teams focused on rebuilding integrations, redoing audience tracking and data. All of the ways we interact with the platform may or may not shift, and it's going to create a lot of challenges.

But I think there are also opportunities. If you're the first one to figure out how the new algorithm and system works, there is an emergent opportunity for creators.

MediaPost:  So far, it seems Oracle will use ByteDance technology to rebuild and retrain the TikTok algorithm. What impact do you see this having on the platform?

Sutton:  The interesting thing is that the training data will fundamentally change because your audience is only in the U.S., so creators are going to be creating content for U.S. audiences. 

There’s an interview where Mark Zuckerberg and MrBeast talk about Instagram, and MrBeast said, “If I go on there and don't say any words, my reach grows by 5x because the moment your algorithm determines that I'm speaking English, it stops sending it to certain users.” 

Because a vast majority of people in the U.S. speak English, what will it mean for U.S.-based consumers of content in foreign languages? That gets really complex. 

MediaPost:  It sounds like creators’ content output could completely change.

Sutton:  Content is often created for international audiences. So much of Spanish-speaking content, for example, isn’t geared only for the U.S., but the larger Spanish-speaking population. The TikTok selloff will potentially cut off huge sources of content for huge swaths of audiences.

Even if Oracle were to have the same algorithm and mechanics, the simple fact is that the content is now truncated to the U.S. and the algorithm and the way that it is going to push content around will be different.

MediaPost:  How could this affect the user experience?

Sutton:  We don't know exactly. You can put things in front of me that theoretically I’ll like, but does it reinforce negative beliefs?

Does it reinforce an American-centric perspective? I think about Premier League Football and FI -- highly international sports. How do I consume that content?

Am I now only hearing about FI from U.S.-based news sources or the U.S.-aimed arm of Sky Sports and they have multiple channels for the different apps? 

MediaPost: Will companies have to splinter their TikTok presence across different channels?  

Sutton:  If Sky wants to interact with me, they will need to have a U.S.-based account on U.S. TikTok and then another Rest of World content strategy. Maybe they're bifurcated by audience. If the U.S. likes McLaren and everyone else likes Ferrari, do I then skew my content strategy? 

These are the implications. Audience pairing will inform content creation, which will then inform the algorithm and what we end up consuming, and then as a consequence, how can advertisers leverage that to advertise?

MediaPost:  I’m thinking about FI racing teams’ current initiatives with TikTok. How would an international team change their strategy?

Sutton:  They’re going to end up with more complex multiplatform strategies.

MediaPost:  What about TikTok Shop?

Sutton:  Merchants will have to gear custom-curated inventory and product selection toward regional preference.

If a TikTok shop only has 10% of their total products sold to the U.S., they will have to figure out if it’s worth them now spinning up an entirely new TikTok shop with dedicated inventory negotiated agreements for what was only 10% of the revenue, but the alternative is they lose 10% of their revenue.

So then maybe U.S. consumers get cut off from those certain products -- there are some very interesting consequences. 

MediaPost:  What else could drastically change?

Sutton:  We're integrated with a dozen or more APIs in the ecosystem. Are those APIs going to remain the same? And will they have post persistence?

In other words, if the people who like and engage with your posts from the non-U.S. app are not ported over, will all of those engagements go away? Does all your comment history disappear? 

MediaPost:  What impact do you think the U.S. government’s involvement with the new TikTok app will have on consumers’ and brands’ outlook?

Sutton:  Because TikTok has become such a heated topic, I think there will be increased attention on a smooth rollout.

My hope is that we continue to see a platform and strategy that supports and facilitates open communication, freedom of speech, and entertaining content.  I think also the users of TikTok in the U.S. want it to maintain the same characteristics, and there's a financial interest in it continuing to have that user adoption.

Out of the gate, making the platform as similar as possible to the current structure is in everyone's best interest.

MediaPost:  Will any American users be able to access the global TikTok app? 

Sutton:  They will have to provide more clarity on this. I think international organizations that have U.S. entities will be able to then interact via their U.S. entities.

What's unclear is whether there's a way to syndicate international content for consumption by American audiences in their strategy. I think it's going to be a slippery slope from a data privacy and national security perspective, because the more that they open those, the more the app just becomes what it was before. 

MediaPost:  Once the deal is finalized, TikTok will become one of the only nationalized social media apps in the world.

Sutton:  Of significance, yes. The only other precedent for a regionally dictated platform would be the kind of core apps in China that are limited. I think there's an interesting lesson to be learned from those applications around reinforcement of nationalistic beliefs, lack of diversity, and uni-country thinking. 

MediaPost:  Do you think the new TikTok could become wildly unpopular?

Sutton:  I want to see them be successful because it helps creators and brands, but it’s a very real possibility.

There are a variety of decisions that have to happen for this platform to be successful. The app experience, political backlash, and/or user backlash could be present.

I think it's going to be incumbent upon this new organization, Oracle, and all the parties that be to avoid those potential pitfalls. 

MediaPost:  Is there a chance that launching a new TikTok could be as chaotic as Musk’s Twitter takeover?

Sutton:  I think it’s a different paradigm. The rhetoric with Elon and X at the time surrounded a new for drastic change.

But the rhetoric around TikTok is that it’s a valued and loved platform with good employees. They’re focused on isolating a problematic component of national security and data privacy. I think they’ll focus on retaining the good.

MediaPost:  Should users be less concerned with data privacy issues on TikTok under American ownership?

Sutton:  I have long thought that this is a good catalyst to have a broader discussion about child safety, national security, and data privacy. There were some particular hearings with Mark Zuckerberg around Facebook that showed a lack of understanding by politicians around emergent technologies. 

My hope is that there is a bipartisan group that dives into the consequences and implications of social media for the sake of the American people, and make sure we're doing what we can to advocate for mental health, safe usage, child protection, national security, and data privacy in the context of what is a very complicated landscape of social media networks.