Personally I think the problem isn't people doing an awful job, it's attention. On the TV they frequently interrupt your program but you'll endure it as the content is longer than the ad. Same with Radio. In Magazines and Papers they constantly jiggle around all the content so you have to at least scan the page to see if it's an advert or an article which means they have at least a chance to grab your attention.
Web ads cannot grab your attention because the content they surround is bite-sized so any attempt to interrupt is so much more jarring. They tried a few different ways and generally they failed. The worst new one is the put an ad in the middle of the text, but that too is incredibly jarring and confusing. Another example is the attempt to monetize funny videos by putting a 15 sec ad clip in front of it. But quite often this is as long as the content! Do people even try and endure the ad? I'd love to see the numbers. If I click play on a random video and an ad starts I usually skip to the next article rather than watch the ad.
Also when you get into something like Facebook the adverts sit in the same place every time. Which you learn to skip automatically very quickly as you're usually not interested in them. You never have to play hunt the article apart from the very occasional site that has the full page popups which generally means you will start avoiding that site.
But worse for advertisers, if they make them too intrusive people can just turn them off. Brilliant!
The only ad I've recently seen that made me think, hmm, this could work are the occasional full page background adverts they run on IMDB.
Also Facebook didn't used to have ads, they just added them to the side of the page at one point. And I doubt the future of ads does look like the Deck Network, it's just another advertising network. They seem to be teaching some strange ideas at your college, I'd be interested to see the data that backs it up.
