Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste. European baby formula manufacturers advertising to middle aged single men in Wyoming shouldn't happen, and it's because targeted advertising that we prevent that waste. We are all better off for it.
How about this: everyone already knows what they need and where to get it.
That really reduces the infernal waste of advertising completely.
You're overestimating people ability to know what they want, and moreso where to get it.
And if they did know they wanted before the advertisement, then they’d go look for it at a store, online or otherwise, or in a catalogue, or so on.
Everything else is a want.
Sometimes people invent things that others want, but that others don't know about yet. That's what advertising is for.
Following your argument, the world 30 years ago (when we didn't have targeted ads) would have been a terrible place. Perhaps you should explain why it wasn't.
To me it only means that advertising in itself is not really advantageous, except if everybody else is doing it. It's like a prisoners' dilemma for companies and we are all paying the price in the form of more expensive products, but also in the form of more consumerism.
All of those things made the world a better place, as did the targetability of common-sense regulations around advertising to children during their regularly scheduled TV-watching timeslots.
Regarding children needing protection against any kind of ads, that's a good point, but dropping targeted ads does not mean we would need to drop targetability of regulations as you put it.
However, on the internet, there is no controlling who sees or clicks on your advert without targeting controls, hence why said targeting controls are a godsend and should be protected.
You can control which sites you’re paying to run your ad on the Internet, just like anywhere else. The idea that internet advertising must be wholly indiscriminate without spying on and targeting individuals is absurd.
If a European baby formula company wants to sell more product they could buy ads that show up when someone searches for baby formula {intent} or run ads on childbirth YouTube channels {interest}.
If a middle aged man from Wyoming sees those ads, he would have been mis-targeted regardless.