No I Didn't

There's a bus bench ad near my house. It just has a simple photo (a stock image of an overly excited person, if I remember correctly) and a line of text with a phone number. It says "You just proved that advertising works!"

Obviously, the logic is that noticing and reading the ad means success.

Sadly, the majority of "marketers" probably think this is true.
To anyone who bothers to think about it, though, it's obviously nonsense.

Using the ad as its own example:
I'm in the marketing field. In fact, buying media is one of the main things that I do. I should be the perfect audience for the ad's message. If it really worked, I should have called the advertiser by now. At the very least, I should have remembered the phone number. Or gained some appreciation for the sophisticated elegance and tactical genius of putting commercial messages on bus benches.
Instead, I think no more positively about it than I did in the past. I'm no more aware of bench advertising than I was before driving past.
That same "You just proved..." message has been there for months, so I can only assume that nobody else has been sufficiently impressed to book that space either.

I won't belabor the point. It's simply that "Awareness is not enough". Even the old Marketing 101 "A.I.D.A." model recognizes this.

Along with the bus bench, I noticed a few other things the last time I drove down that stretch of road: some road kill and an abandoned car in the ditch (unrelated, I assume) come to mind. Did I "...just prove that roadkill and stalled cars work!" too?