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.