In March 2025, Vaseline’s marketing team did something that most brand managers would find professionally terrifying: they handed the creative brief to TikTok.
Not literally. But close enough. The result was one of the most awarded campaigns of 2025 — a Titanium Lion, two Grands Prix, and six Gold and Silver Lions at Cannes — built not on a clever concept from a creative director, but on 3.5 million organic social posts from people who’d been using Vaseline in ways the brand had never officially suggested.
A 153-Year-Old Brand With a Relevance Problem
Vaseline has been on bathroom shelves since 1872. Robert Chesebrough, the Brooklyn chemist who invented it, was so convinced of its properties that he reportedly ate a spoonful every day. The product itself hasn’t changed much since. Neither, for a long time, had the marketing.
By the early 2020s, Vaseline was a trusted, ubiquitous, slightly boring brand. People bought it. They didn’t talk about it. It didn’t generate culture. It sat in the medicine cabinet next to the cotton wool pads and got used without being noticed.
Then TikTok happened — specifically, the corner of TikTok obsessed with affordable skincare hacks. Users started documenting everything Vaseline could do beyond its official use case: as a makeup primer, a perfume extender, a leather conditioner, a squeaky-hinge fix, a brow gel, a DIY photo diffuser. The content was enthusiastic, specific, and entirely unsolicited. Over 3.5 million posts.
Unilever’s Vaseline team was watching. And instead of sending a cease-and-desist or ignoring it, they asked: what if we validated this?
The Idea: Take the Hacks to the Lab
The campaign — developed by Ogilvy Singapore with support from Ogilvy UK, Edelman, Mindshare, and VaynerMedia — was called Vaseline Verified. The mechanics were simple: Unilever’s R&D scientists would test the most viral TikTok and Instagram beauty hacks in an actual laboratory. The ones that held up scientifically got a #VaselineVerified seal. The ones that didn’t were publicly debunked.
Anchouring the content was a series of lab-style videos featuring brand scientist Siphiwo, whose delivery was dry, factual, and oddly compelling. No glossy studio. No celebrity. Just a scientist in a lab coat testing whether Vaseline really does extend the life of a perfume (it does — the occlusive barrier slows evaporation from pulse points) and whether it works as a hair dye barrier (also yes).
The campaign invited creators to submit more hacks via #VaselineVerified and #ItsAVaselineWorld, and over 450 influencers were brought in not to promote the brand, but to co-create content within the same framework: here’s a hack, let’s find out if it actually works.
Why This Works Strategically
The Vaseline Verified campaign is a near-perfect execution of a shift that most brands talk about and few actually do: letting the audience become the creative brief.
The conventional version of this is user-generated content campaigns where brands ask consumers to submit photos or videos. Most of them fail because the ask is too broad, the incentive is too weak, and the brand-consumer power dynamic makes the whole thing feel forced. Nobody wants to create content for a brand that isn’t creating anything interesting itself.
Vaseline got around this by not asking for content — it responded to content that already existed. The 3.5 million organic posts were proof of real consumer engagement. The campaign didn’t manufacture enthusiasm; it met enthusiasm where it already lived and gave it scientific credibility.
The lab validation layer is the clever move. By adding genuine R&D rigour — real scientists, real testing, real debunking — Vaseline transformed viral speculation into authoritative information. The brand became useful to the conversation rather than merely present in it. That’s a meaningful distinction. Usefulness earns trust in a way that presence alone never can.
There’s also a structural honesty to the campaign that cuts through. Vaseline didn’t commission the hacks. It didn’t invent the use cases. It found them in the wild and took them seriously. That posture — humble, curious, service-oriented — is almost impossible to fake, which is why it resonated with Gen Z audiences who are finely tuned to detect inauthenticity.
What Unilever Took Away
For Unilever, the implications went beyond Vaseline. CEO Fernando Fernandez cited the campaign as the model the company wants to replicate across its entire brand portfolio. The plan is to redirect half of Unilever’s advertising budget toward social-first, creator-led content — a structural shift for one of the world’s largest advertisers.
That’s a significant bet. And it reflects something the Vaseline campaign demonstrated clearly: in a media environment where organic reach is scarce and ad fatigue is high, the most valuable thing a brand can do is find where genuine interest already exists and position itself as a credible, helpful presence within it. You don’t need to manufacture excitement if you’re smart enough to find it where it’s already happening.
Vaseline didn’t become relevant by trying harder at advertising. It became relevant by taking its own audience seriously — and having the scientific infrastructure to prove it.
In 2025, that was enough to win the biggest prize at Cannes. Worth thinking about what that says about where advertising is going.
