Vaseline
Vaseline
Vaseline Originals: Giving credit and commercial value back to the internet's true innovators
Client
Vaseline
Year
2026
Vaseline Originals: Giving credit and commercial value back to the internet's true innovators
Client
Vaseline
Year
2026
For years, Vaseline has been the hero product in countless viral beauty hacks across the internet. While this user generated content drove immense cultural relevance, it also highlighted a fundamental problem in the creator economy. The original creators, the early voices whose innovative ideas first sparked these trends, were often forgotten. Their hacks were copied and remixed endlessly, leaving them without credit, ownership or a share in the value they had created.
Vaseline needed to evolve its role from a passive beneficiary of this culture to an active and responsible steward of it. The challenge was to move beyond simply acknowledging viral trends and instead find a way to formally recognise and reward the community's true innovators. How could the brand build a more equitable model that shared commercial success with the very creators who inspired it?
“For years, creators have been reimagining what Vaseline jelly can do, often without recognition. This campaign is about giving credit where it’s due: acknowledging, celebrating and rewarding the people behind those ideas. More than a campaign, it signals how we want to build going forward with our community, not just for them.”
Nathalia Amadeu, Global Brand Director, Vaseline at Unilever
Ogilvy, part of WPP, developed a pioneering new model for creator partnerships. The strategy was to treat creators not as hired amplifiers, but as true business partners and participants in brand development. By identifying the originators of its most popular hacks, some dating back over a decade, Vaseline could formally recognise them as "Vaseline OGs". The approach was to go beyond a one time fee and create a shared ownership structure, co-creating official products and giving the originators a genuine share of the sales.
“We started with a simple creative provocation: what if the best ideas were never in the boardroom, but already in people’s bedrooms and everyday routines? We traced how Vaseline was being used in culture back to its origins and found the OG creators who had been shaping these hacks long before they became mainstream. Vaseline Originals is a move from ownership to stewardship, honouring our OG content creators by sharing our success with them.”
Nicolas Courant, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy Singapore
The "Vaseline Originals" programme identified the creators behind viral hacks like using Vaseline Jelly as a brow tamer or a makeup primer. The brand then partnered directly with them to turn these ideas into official, co-created products. The creators' faces and stories were proudly featured on the packaging, and for the first time, they received a portion of every sale. The initiative transformed their original, uncredited content into a real and ongoing shared revenue stream.
The new model was a phenomenal commercial success. The first two co-created products, a brow tamer and a makeup primer, outsold the classic Vaseline Jelly by 466%. More profoundly, the campaign changed Vaseline's entire innovation process and set a new, more equitable standard for the creator economy. It proved that by treating creators as genuine business partners, brands can build a more authentic and commercially powerful model for growth.
+466%
outselling Vaseline Jelly
1
product sold every 2 seconds
+24%
new hacks posted
“Vaseline Originals represents a deliberate strategic shift in how we build this brand, moving from validating what the community creates to actively shaping and developing ideas inspired by them. The commercial signals have been unambiguous: products selling out in minutes, demand scaling with every drop. But what this campaign confirms goes beyond a single launch. It shows that community-led innovation isn't just culturally resonant. It's a growth engine. This is how Vaseline stays relevant for the next generation, and how we intend to keep building.”
Aanchal Sethi, Asia Managing Director Unilever, Ogilvy Singapore