I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.

They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.

However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.