I strongly disagree that using paid search for lead generation is a misguided tactic. As someone with significant lead generation experience across all online channels, paid search done properly drives the highest quality leads as it's the most targetted channel. One does need to exclude content-based paid search as that is a lower quality opportunity (users are not searching there for your offer but see it associated alongside of ideally relevant content). But to be clear -- paid search will drive the highest quality lead gen traffic vs. other channels and should be part of any significant online lead gen effort.