One of the things that has had the most profound influence in my life was to apply for and get a fellowship that paid me graduate studies in the US. The only reason I learned of its existence was my mom seeing an ad of it on the newspaper.
1. Targeted ads requires enormous machineries of surveillance and file-keeping. Having too much information in closely related form is akin to having too much uranium in close proximity; it causes problems all of its own almost just by merely existing.
2. Ads in general, even the beneficial ones are, by definition, distracting from whatever content we were trying to read. See: São Paulo’s “Cidade Limpa”.