I assume their scraper was more in depth. If you had friend-type permissions back then you could perhaps see their posts and shares. You'd need post and share content to run text analysis, figure out their hot buttons based on language and frequency, sort them into groups and then target then.
Affiliate marketers could also upload lists of unique user ID's (like the FB group members scraped above) for specific ad campaigns, y'know, disguised hookup sites, skin cream credit card rebill offers, etc.
Back then, many of the privacy options were deeply hidden, obscure, changed names a couple times a year or were unavailable.
That said, since you can target specifically, if the system did allow some way to exfiltrate user data, it would make financial sense for larger analytics companies to do so to provide value-added services where they could target much more specifically than Facebook intended (or at least intended to make obvious?).