"targeted advertising is the only way forward"
Targeted ads are a myth. You can't really guess well enough what someone is going to buy next. Despite the huge slurping, and AI hype, they have very little clues about how people really buy goods.
It's much easier to target political propaganda - which is mostly monodimensional - than ads to sell stuff - because it's highly multidimensional, and they buying behaviour is conditioned by many other external factors even the actual level of slurping can gather and control, because they happen in the real world and may not leave any online trace at all.
Also, as with any successful product, it's not just delivering what most customers ask for knowingly, but what customers never asked for but which address needs that will make the product a killer one. That's true for ads as well - you could see an ad for a product you never thought about, which would never be offered to you analyzing your data, but could be exactly what you need.
But it's much more lucrative to lull advertiser into the idea they'll have a much higher ROI because of "targeting", and then make up some data to tell it works - how many times Facebook was caught altering the data?
Actually, untargeted, unobtrusive ads are the way forward. Just use context - people reading ElReg will be more interested in some kinds of ads than others. It's quite useless you show me here ads about my past purchases for my photography hobby.