“The least important most important thing there is”

I have worked in advertising for many, many years. However it has been a year or more now since I last worked on a campaign. I do other stuff now, stuff which is deeper, more rounded you could say but I do miss advertising.
I make up by watching Mad Men (for those of you who don’t know, Mad Men is a TV show in the US centered on a Creative Director- Don Draper- on Madison Avenue in the 60’s. Mad Men is among the most acclaimed TV serials of the past few decades. It has won Emmys for consecutive years and is currently running in its fourth season- the 12th episode was telecast last week).
In the latest episode, Don is rattled watching the agency in which he is a partner fall apart. Ruing the fact that he seems to be able not do much his rant to his second in command in creative is: “We are supposed to just sit writing on our typewriters as the walls around us fall down We are after all creative- the least important most important thing there is”
A brilliant piece of self-awareness don't you think? And then Don Draper does a startling thing. His agency is going down because American Tobacco took away Lucky Strike, an account that accounts for more than half on his agency’s billing. Don takes a full page ad in the New York Times headlined “Why I Quit Tobacco” pithily decrying cigarettes as a product, swearing of ever working on a tobacco account again. The cat is now among the pigeons. Don believes this ad will attract new clients to his agency and save it. His partners think he is wrong and are furious at him. Will the agency be rescued? Will Don be proven right? Hold your breath for the next episode (to be telecast in the US on Monday and to be in my hands by Wednesday).
The fictional Don Draper’s fictional full page ad is brilliantly written. The kind of copy that one doesn’t see any more in real life as all the real talent in advertising is now creating television commercials. Advertising in it’s hey days of creative work in the press has seen some of the most effective writing in the world. Forced to be brief, forced to work to a brief, brilliant writers after brilliant writers have produced work that I know will not be celebrated or remembered but, in my belief, should, in all fairness, find a niche in the annals of creative work that lasts. But it was all done by hired hands working as handmaidens to crass commerce, so put it in that trash bin with yesterday’s newspaper. Now let’s move on to the important important things, shall we?