Re: If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit
Privacy centric advertising is inherently self contradictory.
Hardly. Contextual ads ("I have a user looking at this article about the new BMW i3. Would you like to place an ad?") is both effective and privacy-preserving. No different to placing an ad in a magazine (which people still do). You're simply targeting a class of viewer, not a specific user.
I'd suggest what people actually want is not so much privacy centric advertising, it's advertising that is small and unobtrusive (the old days of mini text adverts), doesn't slow down a site, and preferably doesn't track users.
That's what privacy-preserving ads tend to be, yes. Not necessarily the unobtrusive bit (that's up to the site devs), but contextual ads are fast - because you don't need a dozen different trackers to query your different brokers and middle-men. In fact the whole thing could be server-side - "user looking at page <x>", auctions the spot, receives the ad and places it in the page "natively".
They also tend to be cheaper for the advertiser and provide more revenue for the provider - because you're not losing that cut to all the data brokers in the middle.