If you've ever walked down the strip in Las Vegas, you'll encounter something strange - there will be people standing on the sidewalk trying to put business-card size ads in your hands, with pictures of beautiful women on them and phone numbers. (It's exactly what you think it is, and I seriously doubt the pictures are real).
I think that this is modern advertising in its purest form. It is in your face and hard to avoid, unsolicited and unwanted but pushed on you anyway, and somehow legal. It also results in a large amount of litter as most people realize what just got stuck in their hand by a stranger, and recoil from it, dropping it on the street.
And this is where I come to my point - I think that modern advertising is like litter - literal or figurative. It's stuck in front of you whether you want it or not. Even if you pay services not to see ads (X, Amazon Prime, Netflix) they will show you some ads anyway (although X will let you pay them 100's of dollars per month to allegedly not see any ads).
Advertisers often do smarmy things by disguising their ads as something you might care about - the direct mail marketing disguised as a legal notice, the unsolicited call where the company DBA name uses an unaffiliated company's name, e.g. "I'm with Ford Explorer Extended Warranty Service" or whatever.
The worst is the ad networks, who build huge surveillance apparatus to try to scoop up every bit of context about you and associated it with every activity you do online. This is just inviting abuse.
Does anybody really want a world where, when you stand in a city, there is no direction you can look (maybe up, for now?) and not see advertising?
Does anyone really want an online world where pages take 10x longer to load than they need to, because of all the surveillance, ad network bidding, and ad delivery code, all to render a page where it's difficult (often intentionally- I'm talking to you Google) to find the content you're looking for among all the ads?
We - technologists - built this world, because we designed the web so that servers would be able to control the experience. In the old Gopher world, it just would not have been possible. In today's "web is a platform" world, every page you visit is not just content, it's an application trying to shape your behavior. I don't want my behavior shaped. I want to read your damn article. But maybe not so much.
And we - consumers - encouraged this, by not being willing to pay for content. Everybody likes free stuff, but your free stuff comes complete with surveillance and digital graffiti all over it. Of course this is also partly the fault of technologists who never came up with a micropayments system; no one can afford dozens of $5-$20 subscriptions per month for content but lots of people would set a $1 budget a day that would cover reading several articles across several sites.
And advertisers are also censors - as they collectivize into marketing companies, they pressure the sites that they pay to present ads, to suppress "undesirable" content. You don't notice until it hits you. And you're a hypocrite if you don't care if someone else's content gets suppressed but then scream and cry when yours does.
I really think that we should pass laws eliminating the surveillance technologies, fingerprinting, cross-site behavior linking, data brokering, transfer of data to 3rd parties, etc. We as technologists and citizens should build and demand micropayment systems, that don't suffer from Visa and Mastercard's usurious transaction taxes.
We also should consider going after ad cartels with antitrust. Google just got hit; we'll see if anything comes from that. But they're not the only actor.
I know very little will change because there's so much money involved that our legislators are unlikely to do anything. It just makes me frustrated. end rant.