"High fidelity targeting" working and "having a lot of data about people's choices and habits allows you to better manipulate them" are related but not identica

"High fidelity targeting" working and "having a lot of data about people's choices and habits allows you to better manipulate them" are related but not identical things. It seems at least plausible to me that pre-internet advertising wasn't really much worse than what we have now, there's just more ways to attach cost to outcome. But the amount of data companies have on their markets now is astounding, and can be used in more ways than just directly targeted ad serving.