Most people have never run an ad on facebook. They haven’t seen the back end interface that allows just about anyone to carefully target individual demographics, interests, and specific likes/dislikes.

Most people don’t understand how many huge saas companies are out there building browser trackers and aggregators of 3rd party data to totally understand what users do on your website.

Everything is built on tracking a customer and building a profile of them in order to sell them something at just the right time. Personally, I don’t have the same moral objections to this that everyone else does, but that doesn’t matter. Customers want to be able to choose how much data they share with who. That seems like a reasonable request.

Apple (and a host of 3rd party extensions) are going to fulfill that request. The rest of the market will follow. Google will probably be able to circumvent most of it, because of how integrated they are into most workflows (how many people use none of chrome, gmail, drive, or search?). Facebook could be in big trouble.

Already there is a growing movement for people to leave the facebook suite of products, largely because people disagree with the companies stance on censorship and hate speech. If I were in charge at facebook, I’d be thinking about radical changes to end this debate and reposition the company as more consumer focused.

This all brings me to my larger point. Advertisers have been cheating. It currently requires a minimal amount of skill to be able to target the top 10% of people who are most likely to buy your product. After privacy controls are ubiquitous, and opt-in, the world of advertising is going to be different.

Where’s it going to go? Personally, I’m betting on content. It’s no longer going to be enough to show a picture of your product to 10000 people who seem likely to buy based on tracking metrics. Companies are going to have to either a. radically increase ad spend to get in front of more eyeballs, or b. make content that’s so good it gets shared to the right eyeballs.

This isn’t going to hurt coca cola, it’s going to crush some of these e-commerce brands whose main strategy is just “show it to the right people.”

At my company Agrarian.Design we handle social media marketing for regenerative brands. The advantage that they have is that there’s always a real story that has impact on everyone (even people who don’t buy). We’ll be fine, but the companies that can’t say more than “this is a cool swimsuit” should be very worried.