It's a few images. Some of them move, which is annoying.
Rarely, they have sound, which is unacceptable.
There's apparently a lot of tracking going on in the background, yet I haven't seen any creepy personal ads, nor do I know of any effects outside of the ads themselves this tracking could have on my life.
People often mention security problems, and those may sometimes have occurred. Yet I haven't had any malware infection in 15 years+, and have never installed any antivirus software that didn't come with the OS.
If advertisement is nefariously "manipulating our emotions" I guess we're lucky in that they suck at it.
Personally, I'm far more annoyed by TV advertisement.
It's also nothing like "rent seeking", as I pointed out in a reply to that comment. "Rent seeking" doesn't just mean "economic activity I don't like".
I'm not denying that I would enjoy the world slightly more without ads, all other things being equal. But denying that there's something of a trade-off to be considered is simply intellectually dishonest.
And once you take stock of these competing interests, I believe there's a "bad case scenario" that is more likely than not to become reality, in which the loss far outweighs any gains.
"It's just a bullet obeying the laws of physics. The fact you die is of secondary importance."
See what I did there?
The problem is with the advertisers, and the rotten business culture that has developed around that field. A culture of rent-seeking, as another comment alluded, that cares little for how much it may bother, annoy, rankle, fuck with, or otherwise manipulate the people it seeks to spread its message to.
And it truly is rotten culture: marketeers liken to these daily, unending intrusions as storytelling, and then they couch it in 'love' and 'empathy' not because the message actually contains or needs that, but because it affects viewers' emotional states in a way that makes them more suggestive to 'storytelling'. And this is to say nothing of all the other nefarious things we all know they do!
How can you possibly support such a rotten and corrupt collective of individuals and organizations? Today's marketing gospel/culture/practitioners are one of those things that not only needs the baby thrown out with the bathwater, but also the bathtub, the sink, the toilet -- and everything else 'digital advertising' may have touched.