This is a fair point under some ways of looking at the problem. It could be that advertising is just nasty no matter how it is implemented, and thus any system that uses advertising will be tainted. I'm sympathetic to that analysis and am constantly trying to flesh it out.
With that said, what jonathansampson is proposing mitigates at least one harm of advertising: ubiquitous tracking which violates privacy.
They're trying to replace ads with ads that don't require tracking by third parties.
There's actually a whole area of research on this that's pretty fascinating called privacy preserving advertising.