April 2026 was a busy month for Vaseline. The brand showed up at the world’s most famous road race as a nipple sponsor and simultaneously launched a product line that credits the everyday creators who invented its best hacks decades before the brand thought to sell them. Two campaigns. One platform. Both built on the same logic: acknowledge what people have always known about Vaseline, and make it official.
The Nipple Sponsorship: “Safe From the Chafe” at the TCS London Marathon
Marathon sponsorships tend to look the same. Timing chips, water stations, and branded finisher medals. Vaseline saw a different opening. Runner’s nipple is one of the most common and painful problems in long distance racing, experienced by one in three marathon participants, yet almost no brand has ever addressed it directly. Vaseline, a product runner has quietly relied on for decades, decided to name the problem out loud and own it.
The brand secured the official title of “Official Nipple Protector” of the 2026 TCS London Marathon, a race with more than 59,000 participants on the start line. The title itself is the campaign. Calling it what it is, rather than dressing it in euphemism, generated attention across running communities and mainstream media simultaneously.
Research commissioned by Vaseline backed the positioning with concrete numbers. Among marathon participants, 92% experience chafing on course, 67% say it has led to bleeding, and nipple chafing specifically affects one in three. These are not niche statistics. They describe the majority of people at the start line of most major races.
The on ground execution ran across race week. Vaseline distributed a free product at the TCS London Marathon Running Show from April 22 to 25. On race day, April 26, branded “Nip Stops” were positioned along the full 26.2 mile course, giving participants access to product at the exact points where friction becomes an issue.
The campaign, created by Ogilvy Singapore, launched in March as a global initiative before anchoring at London. It extended to running clubs and major race events in the UK, Barcelona, Madrid, Caracas, Rotterdam, Singapore, Sydney, and Hong Kong. Vaseline also partnered with running creators worldwide, sponsoring their nipples in exchange for training content and race day coverage. Creator Jordan Izzett and others turned the partnership into a running series that treated nipple protection as a legitimate part of race preparation, not a punchline.
Hugh Brasher, CEO of London Marathon Events, confirmed the partnership’s logic plainly: anyone who has run an endurance race understands the threat of chafing to sensitive skin, which is why the brand’s presence on course is functional rather than decorative.
Vaseline Originals (OGs): Beauty Hacks Into Real Products, With Credit Given
Two weeks before the London Marathon, Vaseline launched a second initiative that extends the same community first thinking into product development. Vaseline Originals, also developed by Ogilvy Singapore, is a product line built entirely from viral beauty hacks invented by everyday creators, with the original inventors publicly credited and involved in the launch.
The campaign traces back to two creators. In 2008, Jen Chae (@frmheadtotoe) shared a Vaseline brow tamer hack on her blog. Around the same time, Lauren Luke (@laurenluke_panacea81), one of YouTube’s earliest beauty voices, introduced a Vaseline primer technique that made professional beauty accessible to a wider audience. Both hacks spread across the internet for nearly two decades. Neither creator was compensated, acknowledged, or involved in any official Vaseline product development during that time.
Vaseline Originals changes that. The two products in the debut line are the Vaseline Brow Tamer, directly inspired by Jen Chae’s hack, and the Vaseline All In One Primer and Highlighter Jelly, inspired by Lauren Luke’s technique. Both creators appeared at the TikTok Live launch session on March 30, 2026. Both products sold out within minutes.
The campaign builds on Vaseline Verified, the brand’s previous platform that tested and validated creator submitted hacks. Vaseline Verified earned multiple Grand Prix awards including a Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions. Vaseline Verified proved which hacks work, Vaseline Originals credits who invented them, and turns the best into shelf products. The creator becomes a named collaborator, not just an unpaid content contributor.
The numbers behind the platform explain why the move makes commercial sense. Over 3.5 million Vaseline hack related posts exist online, generated organically by users who found real uses for the product with no brand involvement. That is an existing innovation pipeline that Vaseline has not yet tapped at the product level. Vaseline Originals opens that pipeline formally.
Nicolas Courant, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy Singapore, described the underlying provocation as asking whether the best ideas came from the boardroom or from people’s everyday routines. The answer was already visible in years of user generated content. The campaign formalises that recognition rather than silently extracting from it.
Both the Nipple Sponsorship and Vaseline Originals follow the same structural logic. The brand identifies something the community already knows and does, names it officially, and builds a platform around it. The product has not changed. The relationship with the people who use it has.
Campaign Name: The Nipple Sponsorship / Vaseline Originals (OGs)
Agency Name: Ogilvy Singapore
Brand Name: Vaseline (Unilever)
Location: Global; TCS London Marathon, London, UK (Nipple Sponsorship); Singapore (Vaseline Originals launch)
