In a bid to retain big brands amidst growing concerns about privacy and data safety as well as a challenge from Twitter and their vaunted “firehose” of tweets, Facebook has tapped into its formidable data-collection operation to offer a marketing program of unprecedented scale to the world’s largest corporations.

The program, called Grapevine, allows brands and their marketing teams to access specific and hyper-specialized information about consumer sentiment, data gathered from Facebook’s user base of approximately 1.3 billion that could very well tip the balance in a face-off with a competitor. The analysis, according to well-placed industry insiders, is “qualitative, not just quantitative”, enabling a shampoo company to tailor ads based on posts about frizzy hair or a gaming company to hear opinions about their latest release that they otherwise might not be privy to. In the words of a source familiar with Grapevine, “It tells them what people actually are saying and thinking.”

Grapevine is only available to a select number of well-heeled brands in the world right now; an industry source claimed that the bigger a marketing team’s payroll, the higher the chance they would be invited to participate in Grapevine. “The advertisers spending in the millions on campaigns or a half-million dollars for one ad, that’s who has access.”

Grapevine’s rollout is just another indicator that the economics of Facebook marketing have changed right along with the ongoing shakeup of traditional marketing strategies. Now a publicly-traded company, the pressure is on Facebook now more than ever to generate consistent, sustainable revenue; reluctant to alienate their user base with a premium service nor introduce “bothersome” ads into Messenger, Mark Zuckerberg and company have largely turned to brands and marketing teams for big bucks. Changes in Facebook’s privacy policy and the existence of “boosted” ads require brands to pay up to reach the wider audiences they crave; now, if they want to drill deeper for specific information about that audience, they’ll have to bring the big guns.