David,
Something that you can be sure of is that links like that are going to be of less and less value to your site in the future. So, even if, in fact, it's "safe and works for their other clients", I think we all understand that it's not Google's intention that such links will always carry the value they do now or once had. While it may not incur any penalty at this time, their value to your site may be dubious and thus the value of such a service for company may be as well.
What is the value of those links? It might all just boil down to the question: Are you getting what you paid for?--and I think that's what you're asking. But, unless you're willing to tell us the price you're paying for the service, it's hard to give you an answer. On the other hand, you could go to top-tier content publicist and get a quote from them and see how such pricing fits within your marketing budget philosophy. These days, the more editorially-given a link appears to be to Google, the greater its value. As you scale down from that, the cost for acquiring them should be less and less.
Your company's link building is a trajectory based on how quickly it wants/needs visibility, how much visibility it wants/needs, its budget for this type of marketing, as well as its knowledge/understanding of this type of marketing. Faster, shorter-term trajectories targeting relatively small markets are on one end of the scale and do have their place. Slower, long-term trajectories are on the other end of the scale and can effectively achieve different business objectives, but not all of them. Base on that scale, article marketing today is on the faster, shorter-term, relatively-less-traffic trajectory. Does that meet with your company's business objective(s) and is that what you believe you're paying for?