Multinational boosts online chatter after social media users showcase product’s widespread use in life hacks
As a product discovered more than 150 years ago on a Pennsylvania oilfield, the humble pot of Vaseline may not seem like an obvious target for social media algorithms.
Yet the brand’s emergence as a TikTok talking point has placed it at the forefront of an advertising revolution, in which large companies are spending big on content creators and putting fewer resources into promoting products in traditional media.
The petroleum jelly was first manufactured in the 1870s by a chemist, Robert Cheeseborough, who noticed oil rig workers rubbing their skin with a byproduct of the drilling process. Today, a spree of user-generated videos have documented the product’s widespread use in “life hacks”. It has been touted as a remedy for cleaning shoes or prolonging the scent of perfume, as well as a fix for squeaky doors. It has even been deployed to stop the scourge of crisp flavouring sticking to fingers.
Detecting the product’s new life online, marketers at Unilever, the multinational corporation that owns the brand, amplified the hacks by asking their own scientists to test them and letting the content creators in on the results.
