That is true, but "raising public awareness" is just a very small part of what modern advertising does. For products and services to be successful, one just has to place information about their availability accessible somewhere where people will look.

What it absolutely doesn't require is pushing information. If I need a product or service, I'll look it up. As for potentially useful services I don't even know they exist, I'll discover them when I'm bored and start browsing ad catalogues. Everything that I actually need I'll learn from friends and family anyway (aka. word-of-mouth).

Here is where advertisement stops being useful and starts being malicious: the very core principle of "creating a need". The idea that you need to create a need in customer that they didn't have before. This is wrong, manipulative and malicious. I don't need you to hack my life like this and profit off it. I can discover the world on my own.

"Successful" is such a poorly defined qualifier it makes your statement meaningless. I cannot argue against it, it would be like punching jelly.

Please define it concisely and accurately, using a quantifiable metric and no examples, so that I may either provide counter-examples to your statement or question the societal relevance of the metric you choose.