I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase.
A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.
To give you a perspective, efficient "performance" (the kind which wants you to buy now) advertising is a click ratio of about half a percent on ads, which vastly outperforms the basic performance one, usually having a ratio of about a tenth of a percent. Of those fractions of a percent, a fraction of a percent will actually buy...
That still means ads missed the target 995 times out of 1000, so are still globally horrible.
Nevertheless, since ads on the internet are so cheap (prices are often negotiated by 1000 ads, to make it a bit more tangible, and we're talking like 5$ per 1000 ads here), it's still sometimes worth it.
So yeah, the global experience is crap, but that's often not the point anyway.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3730.The_Hidden_Persuade...
That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard.
And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.