> Is it fair for the opponent to have that information?

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.

You realize though that at least a Facebook has the same features, right?

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

> FB went much farther in that for example they let you go back 7 YEARS in a pages ad history

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?)

Yep it does. They tell you exactly why you are seeing a ad.

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

> They tell you exactly why you are seeing a ad

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.

> by marketing to the same customers better or noticing who is being left out.

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.

Yeah, as a consumer, this sentiment isn't gonna get any sympathy from me ... I already despise being "marketed to", which has made me really jaded about content marketing; particularly when I consume it but only realize it's just shilling some product or service after the fact.

All advertising should be (by law, or at least industry standard) clearly marked and disclosed.

Yes it's fair. In the 2016 presidential election campaigns were using micro-targeted voter suppression campaigns that attempted to get certain demographics to stay home. From a story in The Atlatnic: "The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook 'dark posts'—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as [campaign digital guru Brad] Parscale puts it, 'only the people we want to see it, see it.'" If the opposing campaigns had this information they could potentially re-deploy resources.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trumps-...

In my opinion, not only is it fair but it’s important that all ads — particularly political ads — are transparent in this way. This transparency is a public good for media literacy. Marketing is manipulation and often people don’t notice or are tricked into thinking elsewise.

Perhaps this will make more money for Twitter due to advertisers who buy ads for irrelevant segments to obfuscate their strategy.

If your marketing strategy requires depends entirely upon your market not knowing they're being marketed to, or your competitors not knowing who you're marketing to, there's something wrong with the strategy.

It's similar logic in the security industry to the idea of security by obscurity alone.

FB is also doing the same thing, starting today. Brutal.

Is it fair to the people being targeted for manipulation to not know why they're being targeted?