Adtech, I'd say, is less slimy than traditional advertising. With traditional ads, you pay for the product (newspaper, TV, etc.), and then you _also_ see ads on top of that, and significantly more than you'd see nowadays at that. As the cost of running an entertainment service have decreased, ads have become noticeably better. That said, adtech still fucking sucks, but I'd rather that than TV's alternative of almost as much ads as there is content.
I'd say, is less slimy than traditional advertising.
Eh, traditional newspaper-billboard-and-broadcast-TV advertising doesn't try to follow me around and build an identifiable profile of me personally* - or serve up viruses then claim they're unable to stop doing that.
The only virtue of online ads is you can remove them with an ad blocker (and that's not a benefit I've heard ad companies promoting).
*Obviously, there's still some profiling, but it's orders of magnitude coarser than Google has.