Can you name any other business that could function like this? Health care is the only ones that come to mind...
The irony is that one of the ways these big ad tech companies promoted themselves as being better than traditional advertising was because they were supposed to be so transparent compared to the old model where you had to go through an ad salesman and then measure your results in sales.
At least when you have an ad salesman, you have someone to complain to. And their boss, if need be.
It's just like playing along to Google's game (including vague "exact" matches for adwords) because there's no alternative, and no recourse.
It stinks.
And to top it off, almost all digital ads are money losers for the buyer. Its the few that work that get backed into their ROI calculations. Which are essentially a tax added to the purchase price of anything marketed and sold via these channels.
The business is a fraud.