There are two troubles:

1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack.

2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party.

The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.

Most ads that I remember when I was new to the internet were all running flash and had really annoying circus-game-like objectives such as "Can you shoot the basketball through the hoop?!?"

I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.