I've re-read your comment several times and I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at in regards to what ads should be. Advertising for decades

I've re-read your comment several times and I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at in regards to what ads should be. Advertising for decades has worked without the ability of advertisers to track their viewers or interact with them directly and dynamically, and it relied on exactly what you described in the opening sentence; showing an oddly shaped image in whatever newspaper, magazine, publication, or whatever they could stick the image on. With television, ads became minor productions in and of themselves, and while you could get some statistics as to who actually was putting eyes on your advertisement and when, there still wasn't really a need for a spy network to allow the advertisements to function. As an outsider to the industry looking in, I'm sure there are steps I'm missing and not able to fill in myself, but I'm just not sure why it's essential to spy on people. Targeted advertising, in my anecdotal and admittedly very limited experience, is often little more than just shotgunning ads vaguely related to search results or things I purchased or looked at for whatever reason in the past. There's nothing dynamic or progressive about it beyond just spamming slightly less irrelevant information at me, though I really don't ever recall ever taking the time to actually follow through an ad link prior to adblockers. Ad-sponsored search results very often just get in the way of actual search results. The idea of dynamic and relevant advertising seems completely foreign to me in that I can't really imagine how such a thing would actually look/work. Current advertising online seems to be very little more than a game that ad developers play to see who can trick people into clicking on their ad the most and who can collect the most data. Often times, the purpose seems to be less about the advertisement and more about the data collected via the click, or at the very least just generating the click or follow-through more than anything. It's particularly egregious in mobile spaces and apps where ads almost seem to be built around the imprecision of navigation. In Safari on iOS, I can't think of too many sites that doesn't place their banner of ads right along the bottom where you tap to summon the Safari controls, and it's even worse within apps with random pop-ups and ever-changing locations for the dismissal, which isn't much better in my mind than the pop-up warnings in browsers asking "do you really want to navigate away from this great deal?" Advertising in the digital age, in my opinion, has just gone too far in the interest of what it can do instead of what is actually effectual advertising. The dynamic and progressive evolution of the ads seems less about actually providing and informing about a product and instead about gaming the online advertising market, and the fallout of such a battle is harming users.