As an owner of a small business, Facebook's point about small businesses is not inconsequential. Targeted advertising does reduce the cost of advertising pretty significantly for any small business or startup. Without it we're left with brute force advertising that only large companies can afford.
As a consumer I'm thrilled at possibly getting some control back and I will likely switch back to iOS. I am conflicted.
This is not killing the targeted advertisement, this is only killing targeted advertisement with abuse. There are some businesses (small or big) preying on uninformed people. This is the part facebook and google were pushing to advertisers for years.
Hypothetical scenario, imagine you want to sell "overpriced" bike jackets, auto targeting will give you women/men whose spouse has bike but they don't own bike, on xmas time. Cause they are buying as gift, and have no idea what actually it costs, they will have very good ROI for your ads.
Also this is only for their ad network parts, (basically ads you see on other applications), on facebook or google properties you still have same kind of targeting (as they are first party)
Making a claim like only large companies can afford "brute force advertising" is full of fallacies.
There are many other methods marketing that do not use personalized "adtech." "Adtech" is a very small fraction of ways to engage you audience. To top that off, "adtech" is inaccurate, ineffective, and overpriced. Just think about all of the lies people put into their profiles, and all the ad blockers people have installed.
We shouldn't accept that "adtech" is cheaper and more effective on face value, and we certainly shouldn't accept that the only alternative is to do mass "brute force advertising."
e.g. look at what Tesla has done without spending any money on ads, they used Musk's twitter reputation to amasse great publicity. This method, among others thanks to the open internet, is available to all creative marketers.
I'm making the assumption that your small business is the one linked in your profile.
Does your advertising NEED to target individuals? What if you instead targeted Facebook groups for new parents, Youtube videos titled "How to Potty Train", Instagram posts with relevant hashtags.
There is a big lie that Facebook and Google keep selling people. Advertisements do not need to be targeted at individuals, they need to be targeted to content. You don't need to advertise to 20-30 y/o female college graduates. You just need to target content that new parents would look for.
On the other hand, small businesses have to pay Google/Facebook for the targeting. It's the targeting that shifts so much power and such a large share of profits to these two middlemen.
As a consumer I'm thrilled at possibly getting some control back and I will likely switch back to iOS. I am conflicted.