If I know my political ads are most effective with Women, 45-65, who are Hispanic, and that's where I'm focusing my spend....
Is it fair for the opponent to have that information? If they give that level of detail for political ads, I hope they at least spare startup businesses who are still researching to find their ideal audience.
I'm parsing "fair" in the form of: imagine two societies, one where such information is private the other where it's public. Who outperforms?
Would the number of start-ups which cave because an incumbent snipes their marketing outweigh the number who could piggyback on an incumbent's revealed slicing? (The latter, by marketing to the same customers better or noticing who is being left out.) Will consumers see more advertising or less? If more, will they respond to the deluge by defaulting to the incumbent or trying new options more frequently?
I don't know. But we have an opportunity to find out. If this drives innovation, I'd say a case is to be made to open up these data across advertising platforms. Who knows. Maybe it's the tool to pry apart Facebook and Google's stranglehold.
In fact FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS in a pages ad history and not just 7 days like Twitter does
I am not completely familiar with Facebook's ad platform. Does it really let anyone see, for example, which demographics Procter & Gamble is targeting with a particular Gilette ad? (Or its Gilette brand, generally?)
For political ads you can also go to a page and look up all the ad campaigns they are running, how much money was spend, who was target, what the ad creative was, etc
Pardon me, I meant that anyone should be able to see who anyone else is targeting. Currently, when Terrible Kale Bar® shows me an ad, I can see it's because I liked a post of my Portland friend's. But I can't look at Terrible Kale Bar®'s page and see a list of whom they're targeting.
Noticing who is being left out would be a start-up’s marketing strategy that can be sniped by the incumbent.
I agree with the overall sentiments however.
All advertising should be (by law, or at least industry standard) clearly marked and disclosed.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trumps-...
It's similar logic in the security industry to the idea of security by obscurity alone.