Success Quote by David Ogilvy

Ogilvy laces a hard truth with a quiet flex: if your work gets stolen, it probably mattered. The opening "good fortune" reframes plagiarism as proof of impact, a veteran's way of inoculating young creatives against the industry's most predictable heartbreak. Advertising is a copycat ecosystem; formats, taglines, even entire brand voices get strip-mined the moment they demonstrate lift. Ogilvy isn't naive about this. He's prescribing emotional triage: be irritated, then get back to building.

The subtext is more pointed. He draws a bright line between an ad and a brand, a distinction agencies still blur when they chase awards or viral stunts. A "great advertising campaign" is portable; it can be mimicked because it often lives at the surface level: a clever promise, a visual device, a media trick. A brand, in Ogilvy's worldview, is cumulative power earned over time through coherence, product truth, and disciplined repetition. Copying someone else's campaign borrows their clothes, not their body. You might win a week's attention, but you can't counterfeit years of meaning.

Context matters: Ogilvy is talking from the mid-century golden age, when agencies were becoming cultural engineers and "brand image" was consolidating as a managerial religion. His counsel is simultaneously ethical and strategic. He isn't arguing that theft is fine; he's arguing that imitation is a dead-end competitive strategy. The punchline is a creative director's coping mechanism and a CEO's warning: differentiation can't be outsourced to someone else's idea.