Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your entire premise is ridiculous. Advertising is nothing more than bringing attention to your product to your target customer. And without this so called immoral behaviour I fail to see how any business works.
That's when you call any type of promotion advertising, in that case, sure, there is some innocent advertising. People here are (obviously) talking about 'modern' advertising which is what google/fb etc are doing which is just plain bad for everyone except for Google shareholders (I would imagine, besides money, it's not even good for the people working on it as it must do your head in to be a brilliant engineer and…
The tech is fine. The toxic parts (data collection, spying, etc) aren't even in the ad tech divisions and aren't done for advertising purposes.
They collect data because it gives them bargaining power and a seat at the table with state-level actors.