Ah! The gentle swish of creative masturbation. But why should you care?

This piece of half-baked lunacy appeared in a magazine on Sunday.

Doctor Johnson suggested, with regard to writing "Read through your composition and whenever you see something that seems to you particularly good, strike it out."

Davbid Ogilvy referred unkindly to people "skidding about helplessly on the slippery surface of irrelevant creative brilliance" - a fine piece of onomatopoeia.

I don't think we can say the above example is particularly good or brilliant. It is a particularly fatuous and round-about way of boasting - a bad habit in advertising as in personal life.

But why should you care?

Well, it is because there is a gap worth thinking about.

Although a small army of people who want to write copy that gets results has sprung up, they almost all fall into two camps.

They are either devoted to online media, as a result of the ability to measure what works and what doesn't online, or are rusting old relics of the palmy days of direct marketing - like me.

Meanwhile, there is a yawning chasm.

Ignorance is bliss in the big advertising agencies. Showing off is confused with selling. The golden price is an award, not a sale. Countless thousands of otherwise harmless young people are inextricably marooned up their own pink little posteriors.

I predict that as we all find ourselves working away to pay for the greed and folly of the bankers, speculators and politicians a new interest in advertising that gets measurable results will arise. I hope so.

Not before time.