First, yes they are effective for effective marketing professionals. Digital advertising is a vehicle. The marketing creative is still the payload that does the

First, yes they are effective for effective marketing professionals. Digital advertising is a vehicle. The marketing creative is still the payload that does the work, and it has to be carefully and strategically created to maximize return. You can easily lose money if you don't know what you're doing. Second, any marketing professional worth their salary is measuring with a number of tools to verify that the information they're getting from Google/Facebook/etc. is accurate. There are many metrics that only they can provide, but there are enough independently measured data points that fraud would be obvious. Finally, you're blaming Google, but the advertising industry's current state is a product of extreme corporate greed (on the part of advertisers). It doesn't matter whether Google goes away, greed will continue to corrupt in other ways. Look what happened with the rise of ad blockers - native advertising, which is just a nice word for the paid corruption of editorial space, has become so prominent that you can't trust most of the articles you read on sites that were once considered reputable. The "influencer" marketing you mentioned is a perfect example. People with social presence and influence are being paid to lie about a product. You think this is somehow better or more "legitimate"? I would love to hear more about that. At least with Google, I can clearly see where the ads are. So you can try to implode Google or any other facilitator of digital advertising, but money will find a way. It always does. You're trying to change human nature.