LOL. If you think that progressives are generally friendly towards corporations then you've never actually talked with a progressive, have you?
And corporations are not generally progressive in outlook either, there are too many values higher up on ladder of concerns.
Advertisers are one subset that bring a rough approximation of democratic to their decisions, knowing that each person in the market they hope to reach will be deploying something like a vote with their dollars. As with any democratic approximation, it's only progressive to the extent that population is, though it's poor compared to other democratic mechanisms.
You can take issue with whether democratic decisions are good decisions, of course, but that's likely to be an unpopular opinion for obvious reasons. And hey, I hear the person currently running twitter recently went so far as to say vox populi vox dei. Was his expertise in running corporations part of what you meant to scare quote, or is your challenge to expertise, shall we say, selective?
