Contextual ads don’t need cookies. The sooner publishers realize that, the better for them.
Seriously, the completely f'd up view of advertisers ("Ads won't work unless I can basically track everything about you!!") shows how bonkers the world has become. If your job can't exist without in-depth tracking of how a shown ad influences purchasing behavior, maybe your job shouldn't exist.
Seriously, ads would work plenty well enough by just showing the same ads to all users based on the contents of the page (or search query). Honestly, I'd be all for a legal framework that completely outlaws any "personalization" on the internet unless a user clearly and optionally opts in.
Medicine works well enough with leeches, why would improve that.
There is a path to achieving similar adtech outcomes that are privacy focused, and that is what google is trying to accomplish. Why hate something that is trying to achieve what you want?
How about this: Every user, when setting up a new device, gets a clearly displayed option as to whether or not they want to be shown personalized ads based on the tracking of their browser history. Basically, a clearly displayed "Yes, I want to be tracked for the purposes of showing me ads" option. How many people do you think with want to opt in if they really had the choice? Heck, why do you think Facebook is going so bananas over Apple just asking people to opt-in to tracking?
The only 'innovation' going on is making the tracking difficult for your average, non-technical person to (a) know what is going on and (b) how to opt-out.
Personalized ads are the opposite - you're browsing a fashion site, but you'll get car commercials because you've been visiting car commercials lately.
Easily avoidable in such case. You just need to do two things:
1. Serve them from your own domain where the URL pattern isn't obvious (so not something like example.com/ads/ad1).
2. Randomise HTML elements (div names, classes, a random amount of empty divs in between).
Voila, ad-blocks are useless now.
That can be countered by adaptive element-matching algorithms.
Just like with cracking software, it's a cat-and-mouse game, and there are far more mice out there... mice who are willing to work completely for free just to fight back against you.
I am however more likely to click on ads selling me home renovation stuff because they know I've recently bought something in Home Depot. Even though I'm not currently on a home renovation website.
Second most effective are platform-specicic hypertargeted ads, such as Facebook ads. Lot of misses there too, but their first party targeting is good to the point of actually giving me some interesting content.
In practice the third party "contextual" ads mostly are misses for me. Wow, another ad for the home improvement thing I either researched and bought last month, or that I was looking up on a whim and don't have any intention of actually purchasing.