Vaseline Verified: The Brand That Tested Its Fans’ Hacks
People were eating Vaseline. Others rubbed it on their teeth, on a dog’s nose, on a camera lens. The brand could have ignored it, or sent a warning. Instead it did something stranger. It took the hacks into a laboratory. This piece looks at the campaign called Vaseline Verified: what it did, what the brand and its agency say it achieved, and where the evidence stops. We re-opened every source on 10 November 2026.
What was the Vaseline Verified campaign?
It was a campaign in which Vaseline tested hacks that creators had already posted about its product, and gave the results back to those creators and their audiences. Vaseline is a Unilever brand; Unilever itself posted a film about the campaign. The agency is Ogilvy, according to Ogilvy’s own page.
The mechanics, as described in the One Club awards entry, run like this. Hacks were tested. Safe ones earned "the Vaseline Verified badge and exclusive commerce opportunities and coveted trophies." The entry says the unsafe hacks included "teeth whitening, inside eyes, or ingesting it." According to Storyboard18, the brand tested the hacks "in its own labs," and the harmful ones received "a red flag" with an explanation.
So there were two outcomes. A hack could be verified, or it could be flagged. That second outcome is the part most brands would avoid, and it is the part we find most interesting.
Why did Vaseline do this?
We can quote the campaign’s own stated reason. In the case-study film, posted on YouTube by Contagious, the narration, speaking for the brand, says TikTok "has become one of the most alarming in terms of setting trends that are unsafe." It adds that filtering good advice from dangerous recommendations "can be tricky," and that "for the first time, our scientists tested viral hacks in the lab."
That is the campaign’s own account of its motive, and we are quoting it as such. We did not find a statement from a jury or an independent party explaining why the campaign was built this way. Everything we say later about why it may have worked is our reading, and we will mark it each time.
What did the creators get?
The case-study film shows the creator side directly. A creator with a beard-care hack says Vaseline "said, OK, let’s test it out," and that it "took it to the lab and it works." Another holds up an "official trophy box from the team at Vaseline" and thanks the brand "for making my hack verified." Another tells viewers to "click on my shop."
The One Club entry confirms the shape of the reward: a badge, commerce opportunities and trophies. It also describes one creator’s Flamin’ Hot Doritos hack, which "turned it into a product collaboration" that "landed on-pack." That detail comes from the brand’s own entry, so we treat it as the brand’s claim. We did not check the pack independently.
One caution on the clips. They come from the campaign’s case-study film, so they show the creators chosen for it.
What awards did it win?
Two Grands Prix at Cannes Lions 2025, as far as the pages we read say. Storyboard18 reports a Grand Prix in Health & Wellness. Ogilvy’s page reports a Social & Creator Grand Prix and a Gold Lion for Media.
A note on how sure we are. We read those two pages. The Cannes Lions results page itself would not load for us, so we have not seen the festival’s own listing. If you plan to repeat the award count, check it at the festival.
What numbers does the brand report?
Here is where we slow down. Every figure below comes from the One Club entry, which is the brand’s and agency’s own submission. It is a sales document for a jury. It is not an audit.
The headline figure is "+43% Underlying Sales Growth on ecomm combined channels in a 1 month period." The entry does not say who measured it. It does not say what the baseline month was in the text we read. It is a figure about online sales, across combined channels, over one month.
The entry lists other figures as well: 63.3 million interactions, 7.1 million organic views, 3.3 million views from 17 creators, and more than 450 creators at the campaign’s peak. These are also the brand’s and agency’s own claims.
What we are not saying: we are not saying the campaign caused a sales rise. The entry attributes the figure to the campaign. We cannot confirm the link, and no one outside the brand has published a check that we found. If you quote the 43%, quote it as what the entry claims.
What are the three reasons it may have worked?
This section is our reading. No jury or brand statement we found gives reasons, so these are our inferences from what the campaign did.
Our reading, one: they wrote no message. The hacks were already on the internet before the campaign. People were already using the product in odd ways. The campaign did not invent a story about Vaseline. It picked up the stories already being told. The brand’s role was to check them.
Our reading, two: the creators were the stars. The badge, the trophies and the shops all sat with the creators. One creator’s idea ended up on a product pack, if you trust the entry. A creator who gets credit has a reason to tell their audience. A brand that keeps all the credit does not give that reason.
Our reading, three: they said no to their own fans. The red flag means, we infer, that some people who loved the product were told their favorite hack was unsafe. That is uncomfortable for a brand. But it is also why a verified badge means something. If everything gets a badge, the badge says nothing. The no is what makes the yes believable.
We want to be careful with that third point. It is a theory about trust. We did not find a study of how viewers reacted to the red flags. We found no named hack that received one. Storyboard18 says harmful hacks got a red flag, but no source we opened says which ones.
Would a brand normally do this?
You might expect a brand to call the lawyers. Our reading is that when people use your product in ways you did not intend, the usual instinct is to protect the company: issue a notice, keep quiet, or hope the posts fade. That is our expectation of how brands behave, not a measured fact.
Here, the brand went the other way. Storyboard18 says it tested the hacks in its own labs and gave the harmful ones a red flag with an explanation. We cannot say how much that cost, and we cannot say whether the legal team approved it or fought it. We only know the end result.
There is a risk in reading too much into this. Award entries are written to tell a good story to a jury. The same events can look bold in a write-up and ordinary inside the company. We only see the write-up.
What are the fair counter-views?
Three, and they are good ones.
The numbers are self-reported. Everything past the awards comes from the entry. A figure written for an awards jury will tend to show the campaign well. That does not make it false. It means you should hold it loosely.
Scale helps. Unilever is a very large company. Testing hacks in a lab and building a creator program takes money, scientists and legal clearance that a small brand may not have. The idea may travel better than the budget.
One month is short. The headline sales figure covers a single month. We do not know what happened before or after, or whether the rise held.
What can a marketer take from it?
Not a formula. One campaign, from one very large company, with results reported by the people who made it.
The question it offers is a good one, though. Most brands ask "what should our message be?" This campaign started from a different question: what are people already doing with our product, and what do we owe them? The answer here was a test, a badge for the good ideas and an honest no for the bad ones.
Smaller brands can ask the same thing at a smaller scale. Look at how customers actually use what you sell. Look at the odd uses, the ones you never planned. Some may be worth celebrating. Some may need a straight answer. Either way, customers who see their own habits taken seriously tend to pay attention. That last sentence is our reading as well.
The second takeaway is about honesty with numbers. A campaign figure is a fact about who reported it. When you see "+43%," ask who measured it and over what period. In this case, the entry does not say who measured it.
FAQ
Did Vaseline Verified increase Vaseline sales?
The brand’s own One Club entry reports "+43% Underlying Sales Growth on ecomm combined channels in a 1 month period." It does not say who measured it. We have not found an independent check, so we do not say the campaign caused it.
Which hacks got a red flag?
We could not find a source that names one. Storyboard18 says harmful hacks received "a red flag" with an explanation. The One Club entry lists teeth whitening, inside eyes and ingesting Vaseline as hacks of the unsafe kind.
Who made the campaign?
Ogilvy is the agency, according to its own page. Vaseline is a Unilever brand.
Which awards did it win?
Storyboard18 reports a Health & Wellness Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2025. Ogilvy’s page reports a Social & Creator Grand Prix and a Gold Lion for Media. We did not read the festival’s own results page.
Are your three reasons the real reasons it worked?
No. They are our reading of what the campaign did. We found no jury or brand statement that gives reasons.
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Vaseline and Unilever are not involved in this piece, and we have no affiliation with either. We make finished product videos with this kind of thinking in mind: what the viewer sees, in what order, and why they trust it. If you want videos made that way, email us.
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