I believe the key word is 'something measurable'. People remember their obtrusive ads more so they think mission accomplished even though they now try to avoid them as 'the guys with the obnoxious advertisements'. It might be ultimately detrimental to the company but their bosses think it is a good thing and they get rewarded for it.

Metricitisis is a major management disease of our times and neither corporate, nor government nor nonprofits are safe from missing the point completely in the quest for meeting irrelevant metrics so they can say they are a good manager.

Also, the question is, who did the measuring?

I worked once for a small company that had a social media marketing side (separate from what I did for them, but we sat in the same open space). From what I've observed, the social media marketing business mostly boiled down to our people writing reports which shown nicely growing metrics to customers who then happily paid. The metrics might or might not have been correlated with any real-world increase in profits, and really neither side understood any of that. But it looked believable, so customers paid.

I suspect a lot of that is happening in adtech these days - people with no understanding of statistics bullshitting each other with pretty charts.