But in reality, those ads work, which means that people are more likely to make a voluntary economic transaction after seeing them than they would be in the base condition.
So this comes down to: do we believe what people say... or what they do?
This is why I indiscriminately block or avoid them whenever I can. I would like to believe that I'm above the influence of ads but I'm not and I seem to have no control over my or my children's exposure to them. Sure, I could just not use the internet but that's only a small portion of the ads I see everyday; I can't watch TV, listen to radio, read newspapers or magazines, hell I can't even go out in public without being bombarded with them!
But on the internet I have at least a few tools to fight back, but they're slowly being eroded now that advertisers are paying for content itself.
The ads aren't targeted. Or, I'm a really odd target. For example, after this comment section, the next ad I saw was this ad[1] from Dice (served via Doubleclick); a variant of this ad is running on a Billboard in SF, too. Every single variant that I've seen depicts a white or Indian male, typically trying to look sexy but inevitably only looking awkward. All I can think when I see them is "Yes, good, let's continue to perpetuate the stereotypes the industry is trying so hard to fix…". I'll not be using anything from them anytime soon, because of those ads.
Dice is one of the "good" ones, too. Not like all the "Want to live forever? The one weird trick doctors don't want you to know!" or whatever. Do advertisers really think I going to click an obviously fraudulent ad? You might argue "some do!" … but this is targeted ads, right? So surely by now you would know…
At one point, the ads _had_ determined that I was interested in buying computer parts correctly — although I got ads for disks when I was buying motherboards — then continued to display for months after the purchase, when I was of course no longer interested.
That said, I would say yes, I do want targeted ads.
When I search for things with the intent of buying something, the ads I see tend to be for high end products. For example, if I search for 'gas range' (something for which I'm currently in the market), I get ads for Bosch, Viking, and Garland. If I open an incognito tab and search I see results for Frigidaire, KitchenAid, and Hotpoint. If I'm going to see ads[0] I'd like them to be ads for things I might actually consider buying.
I don't see how it's substantially different from the personal shoppers offered by places like White House/Black Market and Nordstorm (I picked those two because my wife uses both of their services, but it's a common practice at many brick and mortar retailers). In the targeted ads case it's a set of algorithms which have, over time, learned my tastes and when I'm interested in making purchases. In her case it's a person who's done precisely the same thing.
[0]: In general I'd prefer not to, but I refuse to use ad blocking as it takes away support for the sites I visit from impression-based ads. I do use Google Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) to eliminate ads wherever possible without compromising on financial support.
That's precisely why I make sure to never see them :)
I wonder what the system thinks that Mirimir wants?