Agreed; social ads are just a more refined version of banner ads. You can push ads at your target demographic until the cows come home, but ultimately the effectiveness of that strategy will be upper bounded by that of sending Shutterfly link to somebody who just Googled "photo prints". Anecdotally, the only ads I have ever clicked and not regretted it were served up by Google.
The ads I clicked and actually found a lot of value in were for small speciality stores on small specialized websites. The thing is, I never see most ads because I run ghostery and https everywhere (no adblock necessary, not sure which of the two does the job though). The ones I see are mostly the useful ones not served by a network.
