Ask Cannon what he does at a Charleston happy hour and he’ll give you the honest version: “I do data analytics and run paid social. I do a lot of backend stuff too — creating site experiences and managing programmatic advertising.” Translation: he’s the person making sure the right ad finds the right Charlestonian at the right moment, and then measuring exactly what happened next. It’s the kind of work that rarely gets a shoutout at the dinner table, but it’s what separates a campaign that performs from one that just runs.

Cannon grew up bringing the paper in every morning. That’s not a metaphor — it’s his actual backstory, and it shapes everything about how he approaches his work. “I want to see this paper continue so that my kids can grow up reading it, too,” he says. “To do that, we need continued support from our local advertisers, and that motivates me to provide the best service that I can.” When your analyst has a personal reason to care about outcomes, that comes through in the work.

Cannon’s “secret sauce” is actually a recipe with two ingredients: local knowledge of the companies and people who live in Charleston, and deep familiarity with every digital advertising product The Post and Courier offers. “I believe that those two things can help assign the right campaign type or types to the advertiser and give a strong foundation for success,” he explains. Most national platforms have scale but no local context. Most local vendors have context but limited tools. Cannon operates at the intersection.

Ask Cannon about a campaign that stuck with him and he’ll tell you about a client who bought every ad spot on every USC women’s basketball article on postandcourier.com. All of them. The creatives were basketball-specific. The targeting was razor-focused. The result was total immersion for readers who were already primed and engaged. “I thought it was a really unique idea,” Cannon says — which, coming from someone who thinks in data, is high praise. It’s the kind of creative-meets-analytical thinking that makes a campaign memorable rather than just measurable.