Is content based advertising such an ineffective thing that we _need_ individually targeted advertising powered by trackers?

Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers. Anyone going to Gizmodo gets the same ads for tech gadgets, maybe even refined by article. Etc, like the pre-internet days.

Maybe you think the ads are irrelevant and want the "better experience" that Google and FB profess, then you get to opt-in to tracking for refined ads. Maybe we can even have fine grained controls over the data/advertising such that we can control our privacy or that one weird search we did doesn't stalk us for months/years later.

edit: I would be so ok with this business model that as long as the content based ads of a given website respect my attention and security I would actually whitelist that website.