The target audience for ads is more than likely thankful for them. There is a lot out there, it is good to be told about the bits of it that make life better.
It doesn't explain the vast majority of ads. Most ads you've seen are for products you - and everybody else - knows about already. They aren't informing anybody of anything.
We also don't see this behavior in advertising strategy. It's not an irregular campaign trying to reach unique individuals. Instead, you tend to see the same ad over, and over, and over in a short period of time. Companies are often extremely transparent about this kind of behavior.
This is not anything like the behavior you would find if ads were at all attempting to merely inform people about a product.
The problem is that the vast majority of ads does not fall into this category. They are actively trying to make you want something and manipulate you into buying things. We can't have nice ads, because the system almost invariably falls into a local minimum of plastering everything with carefully crafted ads that play into people's reptilian brains. The sociopathic and amoral part of adtech will invariably drown out the ones who try to play nice.
Perhaps I'm too jaded, but I just can't see how to change the status quo outside of strong regulation to break apart the existing adtech oligopolies. Unfortunately, even that is a gargantuan task because said adtech oligopolies wield incredible lobbying and political power.
And therefore I hate ads and hate what the adtech industry has become. We vilify the military industry, the oil industry, the finance industry and countless other industries who have often downright negative value contribution to society. And yet the adtech industry is still somehow innocent in the public eye, even though they are just as corrupt as the rest, it's just that the damage they are causing is more insidious.
The target audience for telemarketers is more than likely thankful for them. There is a lot out there, it is good to be told about the bits of it that make life better.
That's more promotions than actual ads, but I don't think I would have been less positive had these been actual ads.
The only things ads may be good for are for funding things that might otherwise have required explicit payments.