[cortesoft]

I think advertising has value, but there is a really good article about why targeted advertising is bad:

https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

The tl;dr is basically that one of the key aspects of advertising is signaling (i.e. we stand behind our product so much that we can waste this much money advertising it to you)... with targeted advertising, it becomes so cheap display an ad to only a few people that you lose that signal, and you have no way of knowing if a product is total crap or not.