It is true that small businesses generally depend on advertising. In recent years, due to the overwhelming popularity of social media and Facebook’s monopoly in this space, this means that many small businesses depend on Facebook. But it doesn’t have to be this way: small businesses would still find other places to advertise specifically, even if Facebook didn’t exist, let alone if their targeting and tracking features were completely obsolete. Think about the statistics that Facebook presents to your ads. What does it mean that 44% of small businesses have increased advertising during the pandemic? That alone, during the pandemic, there are more people trapped at home and as a result, Facebook’s monopoly advertising network sees more consumption. There are more companies advertising there because there are more consumers on the couch looking at their phones. This figure does not necessarily indicate that small businesses benefit from advertising on Facebook, but have no other choice.
The company also notes that without targets, small business sales would decrease by 60% for every dollar spent on Facebook ads. But this is a potentially misleading figure that does not talk about the possibility of these companies identifying alternative places to reach consumers. We already know that without guidelines based on custom optimization, advertising on Facebook would be much less effective. Remember that in the Facebook advertising network, the placement of the ad has an auction price, that is, with less effective targeting, the price of advertising on Facebook would decrease accordingly, which would open more budget marketing so that small businesses can advertise elsewhere. The result? Apple’s policy will shatter surveillance capitalism and return excess profits to traditional media and advertising businesses that will offer small businesses a greater diversity of opportunities to publicize their products and services. A more significant number to report on Facebook would be the way in which disagreement advertising targeting options correlate, if any, with the overall business success of small businesses, not with their sales rates on Facebook. Facebook may investigate and eventually report on the former, but is well aware that this study would not give a useful number for its purposes.
Of course, in the short term, these changes will cause some headaches in updating ad campaigns and code. But people will still want to buy local produce, sponsor mom and pop stores, and donate to their neighborhood charities. Meanwhile, Facebook will inevitably tweak its ad targeting technologies and develop new methods for tracking users in an aggregated and anonymous way through its applications, innovations that will help the advertising industry maintain profitability while respecting new restrictions Apple compliance.
And aren’t these changes the public should want, by any means? At the end of the day, small business owners are also individual citizens and consumers. They care about privacy, just as anyone should, and any increase in data privacy, marginal or not, is an economic benefit to consumers. Small local and digital businesses will still be able to compete equitably, and now their owners will have a little more privacy protection to start with. There are trade-offs inherent in any policy change; it can be argued that even if they are advertisers do experiencing less success in advertising targeting in the near future, however, is good for the whole of society given the gains in individual privacy and autonomy that will also result.
So what is Facebook talking about in its full-page ads? Not in vain, the success of your own business and your business model. Ad targeting and interaction tracking practices are precisely what make Facebook so powerful in the digital ecosystem. We know that the dominant share, more than 98%, of Facebook’s global revenue, which in 2019 exceeded $ 70 billion, comes from advertising. Even 5% success equates to a loss of billions of dollars a year, a cut that Facebook’s financial community – including capitalists, shareholders and executives and the company’s own staff – does not want to see.