How Ogilvy and Vaseline Built One of Advertising's Strongest Creative Partnerships

“Ogilvy has always been an incredibly proud and strong brand in Asia and we’ve got a legacy to live up to,” says APAC CCO Reed Collins. In a conversation with LBB’s Sunna Coleman following the agency’s string of Cannes wins, Reed credits the “best in market talent at every level” and “healthy competitive spirit” as the reason behind the company’s continued success.

Following a number of wins earlier this year at D&AD and The Clios, the Asia region came away with the title of Regional Network of the Year for the third year running at Cannes along with 23 Lions. The network’s most awarded Asian work came from Vaseline, with Ogilvy Singapore’s ‘Originals’ winning a Gold, three Silvers and two Bronze awards, and ‘Verified’ – which earned Southeast Asia its first Titanium Lion last year – winning three Silvers and three Bronze.

“It’s all about relationships,” Reed says of how the team keeps creating success. “You’ve got clients with creative ambition that want famous work and you’ve got clients that need more convincing. But once you build those relationships and trust then you can have a bit more creative freedom. Creativity matters to business results. As long as that’s the true goal, success is a product of that.”

On the Vaseline account specifically, Ogilvy Singapore CCO Nicolas Courant says, “The collaboration works because we set our creative ambition together right from the start. That shared North Star is exactly what guides us through every single brief. We have total transparency with the client, meaning we can push boundaries and have honest conversations about the work without any filters. We all want the exact same thing, which is to solve real community needs with ideas that make a massive impact.”

“That level of trust only comes from working on countless projects together and delivering strong results year after year,” adds Marco Versolato, CCO at WPP@Unilever. “We do not operate like an outside vendor, we are deeply embedded in the realities of their business. That commercial trust is what gives the creative team the freedom to do meaningful, award-winning work.”

“Our long-term vision is to establish a true model of co-authorship,” Marco says. “We see a future where the brand does not just talk to the audience, but builds its next hundred years hand-in-hand with them.”

Thanks to social media, this is now easier than ever. “We can listen directly to our audience and understand their genuine needs more clearly,” says Marco. “We can move quickly and take bold creative risks today that would have been impossible on day one simply because we have built the shared trust required to act on those real creator insights immediately. By blending our skin health credibility with real creator insights, the vision is to ensure Vaseline stays relevant and trusted for generations to come.”

It’s this method that has led to some of Vaseline’s most successful campaigns. For ‘Vaseline Verified’, Ogilvy Singapore senior strategist, Mellita Angga says the team stopped writing briefs about what they wanted to say and started searching for what was already being said. “We went to where the consumers were, online, and we found something remarkable. Vaseline was already everywhere in culture. Runners, photographers, brides, henna artists, and even Thai Buddhist worshippers, communities all over the world had built their own specialist use cases around a single product, completely unprompted. But the brand itself was invisible in that conversation.”

That gap became the brief. “Rather than interfering clumsily, we asked what would genuinely earn us a voice there,” Mellita shares. “The answer was sitting in our history: 155 years of dermatological science. In a world full of unverified claims, that was something no challenger could manufacture. It gave Vaseline the credibility to validate what culture had already built.”

From there the idea expanded. “This wasn't going to be a campaign. It was going to be a platform, one that could permanently reshape how Vaseline shows up in culture, how it grows into new categories, how it sells, how it innovates – all from a single creative insight,” Mellita says.

Bringing independent voices into a massive global brand ecosystem was not easy. Maggie Michella, associate creative director at Ogilvy Singapore says, “There is a major risk of over-polishing them until they lose what made them special. We worked hand-in-hand with strategy to ensure their creative integrity directly drove business impact. Strategy gave us the guardrails and the metrics, but creative built the actual engine to blow it up at scale.”



Reflecting over what the team has learned from their success over the years, Mellita says, “The default setting in this industry is to build, but sometimes the most efficient and often most powerful strategy is to find what already exists and give it structure, credibility, and room to grow.”

Instead of wondering what story to tell, the question becomes about where the strongest organic idea in the category is. “Social listening becomes less about monitoring and more about prospecting,” Mellita explains. “And when you turn up to a meeting with millions of hacks done with your product, or a beauty blog from 2008, or a photo of a marathoner’s bleeding nipples, you're not pitching a hypothesis anymore. You're showing people something they didn't know they were sitting on.”

On this point, she notes the importance of being comfortable recommending the non-obvious choice. “Both ‘Verified’ and ‘Originals’ involved suggesting something that felt genuinely risky in the room. Giving up control of the narrative, getting Vaseline scientists and R&D team to verify online hacks, going back in time to find creators who originated Vaseline Petroleum Jelly hacks. None of that feels safe when you're presenting it. But the best non-obvious ideas are never really a pitch. They come out of a process where the client is discovering it alongside you, so by the time it's on the table, it already feels like theirs too.”

Building on this momentum, the team aspire to continue creating spaces where community can contribute to narrative. “We want to co-author entirely new chapters by letting creators push the brand into places we could not have planned ourselves,” Nicolas says. “The goal is to scale these new solutions globally so we are actively building a lasting legacy for the future of the brand, ensuring it remains as essential to the next generation as it has been to the last.”

“The next step is turning these creator-led breakthroughs into long-term commercial powerhouses,” Marco says. “We have proven that this collaborative model works on a campaign level, so now we are focused on scaling it into permanent global pillars that structurally evolve the brand.”