That's how I read it. He doesn't seem to like that people are calling the ad itself Corny.
I mean, it's been around since before I was born, and I don't know if there's ever been a period in my life where it wasn't regarded as super-corny. I don't know that I'm all that cynical a person, either. But it's kind of a long walk to connect Don Draper to that ad and have the ad still come off as a pure creative expression. Even if it wasn't considered corny before, the fact the show is suggesting that it's just another in a well-intentioned-yet-surface-level fabrication sorta reduces the deeper meaning it might have. Hell, using it as a plot point in the story itself does that.
I don't really understand his use of the word corny, tbh. I don't find the ad corny. And I think, honestly, that he's right about some of the positives of it within the framework of, well, capitalist society. That is, it is an improvement on the status quo, but it is not in any way a real break from it. I think that's even meant in earnest within that context. And that's a word I'd use to describe the ad, personally.
But the ad is still very much about selling a product by hijacking real struggles that can't actually be solved with a bottle of Coke. And it's about turning a movement into an image and a generation (one of the 'largest' and most influential generations ever) into a target.
It can be, and probably is, both these things at once. Just like Don can be having a real moment of revelation and be using that to get him through to his next high.
And I also think that Weiner can believe he's left Don in a positive place, but that Don would still fall down again off camera.
