let me begin by saying, i hate ads. yes, hot take, i know. but i feel especially susceptible to my attention being sapped by other people's bullshit. i literally cannot stop myself from reading and rereading whatever you put in front of me, without intense focus. so the passion of my hatred for ads is involuntary.
the worst kinds of ads are the ones that invite you to think. they can do this in many ways: by being confusing or absurd; by being metaphorical or otherwise layered; or by prompting you to participate. likely other classes of strategies exist as well. i love thinking so this nerdsnipes me hardcore. i realize the paradoxical nature of hating ads so much i chost about them. my passion is, again, involuntary.
so: a close reading of, cum rant about, the eponymous ad slogans.
"your ad here" is the lowest of the low ads. it's an eyesore advertising an eyesore. people who sell ads are landlords, their tenants are mindviruses, and "your ad here" is a wastingly empty house. it should be seized by the government and an appropriate action taken—ideally destroyed, as all ads should be, but in the housing analogy that i am currently extemporating on, this would probably correspond to filling it with communist propaganda. i'm thinking of a chost that was like, hey imagine if every ad was actually a thoughtful and beautiful work of commissioned art that also taught you how to use the bus or why you shouldn't litter or whatever.
"you just proved these signs work" is a bit trickier. on first glance and especially when removed from its context, it can be confusing: what did i do? how did i prove anything? what is the work of the sign? the work the sign is notionally doing is, of course, advertising. the intent is to impress you with a piece of knowledge that you might not expect, a cold read that you self-selected for. it's almost clever.
maybe even too clever. when i first saw this as a child, i don't think i understood it, and i had to notice it a couple more times first. from this, though, we observe that the thinking step can be unsuccessful, especially when the slogan is removed from its context.
i find it quite entertaining to consider that actually, the proof was not so rigorous after all. the sign didn't work because it didn't convince the audience that it works. it's giving false explicit henkin sentence. it's a small beacon of hope for me in an ad-saturated world