On Topic: What next, Mr. Draper?

'It's a hoot.” - Joan Harris, on her job at a 1960s advertising agency.

It seems worth noting - at least to the former English major in me who was taught to ferret out symbols and see patterns, even if they aren't really there - that 'Mad Men,” the eight-year long television show, comes to a conclusion just as TV itself appears to reaching … well, maybe not an end but a serious diversion in how and where it delivers content.

'Mad Men,” after all, centers around an advertising agency - Mad Men being short for the men on Madison Avenue, the one-time ad world epicenter, ruled over exclusively in the 1960s, when the show is set, by men. And commercial TV came of age as advertising began its conquest of the modern world.

And now advertising is casting its eyes to digital. While still spending oodles on TV overall - a breathtaking $187 billion this year, according to Boston-based Strategy Analytics - some 28 percent of that, almost $53 billion, will be spent on digital marketing.

By digital we mean Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, Google Play and the like, as well as online venues that are creating their own exclusive streaming programming. Four different co-workers here at The Gazette asked me in the past week if I'd yet converted to Netflicks - just to watch the new the comic-book-inspired 'Daredevil' series.

The list of online-only selections is growing.

Netflicks, for example, also boasts 'Orange Is the New Black” and the American version of 'House of Cards.” PlayStation debuted 'Powers” last month, another show based on a long-running comic book.

In what I suspect is an attempt to grab an older demographic, Amazon signed up 79-year-old Woody Allen earlier this year to create a series for its fledgling Prime Instant Video service. In 2014 Amazon launched 'Bosch,” a series based on Michael Connelly's Raymond Chandler-esque detective character.

Almost as if to acknowledge this industry shift, the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce ad agency in the next few weeks will shut its doors on its longtime viewers. I asked friends on Facebook what they liked, or didn't like, about the series.

Those who responded mostly lauded the acting and the storytelling: 'No straight lines to any destination,” a former boss of mine noted.

And they really cared about the characters: Another one-time co-worker here in Cedar Rapids wrote, 'It's almost like an auto accident - you don't want to watch (protagonist) Don Draper self-destruct, but you can't help yourself. You always want him to make the right decision, and he usually does not.”

Someone else replied with, 'One word: Peggy” - singling out one of the few female characters to move up the ranks in the not-so-fictional universe of piggish male adult-children depicted in 'Mad Men.”

One friend who works in TV sent along me a photo of himself, stylishly dressed and striking a very Draper-like pose. He noted a parallel between pitching advertising ideas and delivering a compelling story on the air - and he's right.

And even those who said they didn't much care for the show - a bleak and 'sensationalized” treatment of its era, one friend argued - confessed they might give it another chance by binge-watching the entire series.

Maybe fans have enjoyed 'Mad Men” not as much for showing people at their worst, but because it also could tell us about us at greatest potential.

In a season five episode, for example, the agency is about to lose the H.J. Heinz company account. After being tipped off by his wife, Megan, who figured out what was up, Draper during dinner with the Heinz representative starts to spin a new ad campaign for the product.

He and Megan craft a series of 'little movies” of a mother and child eating Heinz beans - from cave people to Marie Antoinette and through to modern day and to colonists on the moon. The tagline: 'Some things never change.”

We know they're fabricating it all on the spot, but the rep doesn't. Draper is concocting the whole thing before everyone's very eyes, as if by magic.

At the end of Draper's pitch, the client sighs contentedly, 'It's the future. It's all I ever wanted.”

They order Champagne all 'round.

The future for TV? That's still to be determined - by the next Don Draper, no doubt.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise editor and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com