> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Simply delicious, peanut-butter filled product shots - URL: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/simply-delicious-peanut-butter-filled-product-shots/ - Published: 2026-10-06T15:23:38.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-06T15:23:38.000Z - Description: Dentsu's own Gold Pencil entry calls every Nutterverse TikTok a product shot. The first one that worked landed January 23, 2023. The moment everybody remembers came 20 months later, and four different social managers owned the account in between. Zero media dollars, 21 names in the credits. - Author: giovanni gallucci - Tags: Organic Social, Social Platforms, Brand Positioning, Consumer Trends, Retail Distribution, shelf-life *Listen to this episode of Shelf-Life, then use the piece below.* Every food and beverage brand manager I know has the same link sitting in a Slack thread, forwarded from upstairs with a note that says why can't we do this. The link goes to [Nutter Butter's TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@nutterbutter?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io). 2.6 million followers, 17.8 million likes, a rotating cast of cookie-headed characters that people describe without irony as terrifying, and a peanut butter sandwich cookie that has been on shelves since 1969 sitting in the middle of it. [Dentsu Creative](https://www.dentsucreative.com/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) New York runs that account for [Mondelez International](https://www.mondelezinternational.com/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and won a Gold Pencil for it in the 2025 One Show. I went and read [the entry Dentsu wrote itself](https://www.oneclub.org/awards/theoneshow/-award/58719/nutter-butter-you-gooda/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) instead of the coverage of the entry, and the sentence that does the work is buried at the bottom of the creative idea section. > While we created content that didn't look anything like a normal ad, every single one of our Nutterverse TikToks had one thing in common: they were all simply delicious, peanut-butter filled product shots. That is an agency describing its own analog horror as product photography. The cookie is in frame every time, by brief, in a document written to win an award. Whoever forwarded you the link thinks the asset is the weirdness. The weirdness is the wrapper on a product shot, and the wrapper is the cheap part. On the show this morning I said the magic lives in the feed and none of it reaches the package. Both halves of that hold up. What I had wrong was the implication that the content isn't doing product work. It is, in every frame, on purpose. ## The clock nobody forwards Rachel Karten dug the origin out in [Link in Bio](https://www.linkinbio.news/p/nutter-butter-committed-to-the-bitit?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), and the dates are the story. The first post in this register that actually landed went up on January 23, 2023: pixelated Nutter Butters, the word Aidan, and a mangled version of "Summer" by Calvin Harris. It took 480,000 likes on Instagram and 63,000 on TikTok. The moment everybody remembers came in September 2024, when a character named Nadia showed up and the Today Show started covering a cookie account. SocialBlade had the TikTok adding 454,000 followers in the 30 days around that spike. Twenty months sit between those two dates. Twenty months of posting content that a reasonable marketing director kills in month four. Ryan Benson worked the account at Dentsu from June 2022 to September 2023 and now co-owns [Loudmouth](https://www.loudmouth.agency/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io). He told Karten about the thing that would get a plan cancelled at most companies: "An accomplishment I'll always hold close to my heart is when we watched the Instagram page double in the following size over the course of a week or two due to one of our very unhinged videos taking off, MONTHS AFTER WE POSTED IT." Months after. That video was sitting in the grid the whole time looking like a failure. In April 2023 the team ran a joke announcing a new direction and posted clean, normal food photography for a day. The comments turned on them immediately. One person wrote "WHY IS IT A NORMAL POST?!? I didnt follow for this." That was eight months in, with a following small enough that nobody outside the account had noticed yet, and the audience already owned the bit. ## It survived four social media managers The account changed hands at least four times and the bit never did. The superfan reference did not start with the team that was there when it broke. Benson says the manager before him, [David Brouillette](https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-brouillette-519009127?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), had already made content referencing a fan named Aidan, and the Nut Games tweet from October 2021 was the account's most notable piece of work when Benson arrived. Benson then spent a year hiding the name in content in ways nobody asked for: ciphers, binary, morse code. He coined "strategic silliness" to explain to people what he did all day. [Aubrey Burrough](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aubreyburrough/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) worked the account across two years at Dentsu and left in June 2024, three months before the spike that made it famous. Zach Poczekaj, [Olivia Matalon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliviamatalon/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), [Sandra Yang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandrayangla/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and Aidan Maloney inherited a running bit from people who had already moved on. So the asset here is a documented bit that outlives whoever is holding the phone. Four people owned this thing and the cookie with eyes buried all of them. On the show I graded cadence down because the whole machine seemed to hang on one person's instinct. It doesn't, and that's the better news. [Aidan Maloney](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-maloney-12384a208/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) is the superfan. He commented his own name, just the name, nothing else, under every Nutter Butter Instagram post for a year straight, until the likes on his comments got loud enough that the brand noticed. The [Philadelphia Inquirer tracked him down](https://www.inquirer.com/news/nation-world/nutter-butter-social-media-aidan-maloney-temple-20241001.html?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) in October 2024: a 2024 Temple communications grad who interned at Dentsu that June and was made associate social manager on the account in August. His LinkedIn now reads Social Media Manager at Dentsu Creative. He is credited on the Gold Pencil under his real job title. Count the credits on that One Show entry and you get 21 names. An executive creative director, two global group creative directors, an art director, a copywriter, a content creator, two associate content directors, two motion designers, a senior social analyst, a VP who heads social marketing and strategy, and on the Mondelez side a brand manager and a director of the Jewel Brands portfolio. Zero dollars of media. Twenty one people in the credits. Both of those facts live in the same document and only one of them ever travels. A senior social analyst is the detail I'd put in front of your CFO. The comment mining that everybody calls instinct is a staffed role. ## What made it possible, in the agency's own words > Nutter Butter's complete lack of advertising in over a decade provided the golden opportunity to give it something most other brands can't get: a fresh start. With no brand guidelines to adhere to, we had the freedom to build a groundbreaking social approach for one of the oldest products in the category. Read that as an eligibility requirement rather than a flex. The Nutterverse needed a brand with no live campaign, no guidelines deck and no equity anybody was protecting. The same entry says that of the shelves Nutter Butter still held, it had been "pushed to the back." Dentsu got handed a brand with nothing left to lose, which is a condition, not a strategy. Kelly Amatangelo, digital and social customer experience lead at Mondelez, told [Marketing Brew](https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2025/06/12/nutter-butter-online-marketing-strategy?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) that the team's spontaneity makes real-time approval necessary, and that this makes planning content far in advance difficult. If your legal review runs on a two week ticket, you are not eligible either, and no amount of nerve on your end fixes that. Burrough's read on why it worked points at the client rather than the creative. "Genuinely, so so smooth," she told Karten about pitching the swings. "Really have to credit the brand team at Mondelez because not many clients would trust their social agency to take the huge swings that Nutter Butter does." And Amatangelo, who owns this program on the client side, keeps a disqualifier list of her own. Asked which brands absurdism is wrong for, she named one out loud, from her own portfolio: "A brand like Honey Maid Graham Crackers? I don't see them going into this strange world." If the person running the Nutterverse will say that on the record about a cookie down the hall, you are allowed to say it about yours. ## The one mechanic that costs nothing Poczekaj gave Marketing Brew the actual rule, and it is free. His team almost always pairs a concept for a post with a comment that already exists. Somebody left a stray comment about wanting to buy Nutter Butters, so the brand posted an image of a cash register slathered in peanut butter and stuffed with cookies. Nadia came out of one of the team's weekly TikTok brainstorms, built on audience theories about Aidan, and Poczekaj says every character in the universe started the same way. > It felt even more jarring to them when they saw their input baked back into the content the next week. A week. That's the whole loop. The comment lands, the brainstorm happens on schedule, the post ships, and the person who wrote the comment finds themselves in the feed seven days later. Nothing in that requires lore, horror, a cast, or a 55 year old brand. It works on a jar of salsa. ## What the numbers say, and what they don't The figure everybody quotes is a 16.5 percent lift in household penetration among Gen Z and Gen Y. It comes from that One Show entry and it carries its own measurement window right there in the parenthesis: latest 26 weeks ending 10/26/24\. Marketing Brew has a second number, Nielsen data from April 2025 putting Gen Z and Gen Y penetration up 15 percent year over year. Both are real. Both are old, and they are two different measurements that get quoted interchangeably as one. I could not find a 2026 penetration figure anywhere. The newest full account of the campaign is [The Drum's writeup from November 19, 2025](https://www.thedrum.com/awards-case-study/how-nutter-butter-revived-its-brand-with-a-surreal-nutterverse-campaign?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), and the newest number in it is from October 2024\. Two years into the most copied organic social program in the snack aisle and the public scorecard still stops at a 26 week window that closed before the 2024 election. The earned side is documented well: 249 million earned views, 20,000 earned posts, 15 million earned engagements, 90.1 percent positive sentiment, 768,000 new TikTok followers, 177 media placements, 3.3 billion impressions, zero media dollars. Crocs made its own peanut butter slathered content, unpaid. On cookies, Amatangelo told Ad Age she couldn't say whether any of it sold more. Awareness that the cookie still exists went up. That's the honest version and she said it herself, which is more than most case studies manage. ## Three things to run this week One, the post. Go into your own comments, not your mentions, and find the strangest thing somebody said about your product in the last 30 days. Not a complaint, not a compliment. A non sequitur. Then answer it as content instead of as a reply. Paste this, fill the brackets, and run it with the still from step two: > \[@HANDLE\] left this under a post last month: "\[THE EXACT COMMENT, COPIED, TYPOS AND ALL\]" > > We thought about it for a while. Here you go. Nothing else. No explanation, no emoji, no second paragraph telling people it's a joke. The restraint is the entire mechanic and explaining it kills it. Two, the still. One product shot, deliberately bad. Product dead center on a surface you did not wipe down first, phone flash on in a room that already has daylight, close enough that the top of the package gets cut off, and a degree or two off level. No board, no napkin, no linen, no second product, no garnish. You want a frame that reads like somebody's camera roll and still shows the whole package. Shoot the clean version too, for the sales deck, then post the ugly one. Three, the video. Twenty seconds, vertical, one phone, no people and no voice. Shot one, three seconds, the comment from step one as plain white text on black, silent. Shot two, four seconds, the product sitting still on the counter, flash on, nothing happening. Shot three, five seconds, one slow push in until the product fills the frame. Shot four, five seconds, the product in whatever absurd place answers that comment literally, which might be the glove box, the shower, the top of the fridge. Shot five, three seconds, black. Pull a sound off TikTok's library that does not match the content at all. Burn no captions, record no voiceover, and don't explain it in the caption either. Post it the same day you shoot it. ## Where this lands at the shelf The part of a Gold Pencil entry worth reading is the eligibility, not the results. Nutter Butter qualified because it had been abandoned: no advertising in a decade, no guidelines to work around, facings sliding to the back of the set. If you have a live campaign, a guidelines deck, a trade calendar and a sales team that reads your feed, you are not that brand, and the cookie horror is not available to you regardless of how brave you feel on a Monday. What is available is the plumbing underneath it, which is cheaper and uglier and wins nobody a pencil. Put the product in every frame. Pair every post with a comment somebody actually left. Then run it for a year before you look at the chart, because the twenty months between January 2023 and September 2024 is the only part of this story that transfers, and it's the part that costs something. There is a Reddit thread from that fall where someone wrote, in complete seriousness, that the account should be forwarded to the FBI for further investigation. Go find your comment. That part takes about ten minutes. This piece is the extension of this morning's show. The show is the briefing, the article is the build, and the post is what you ship. Subscribe to The Daily Trend Report on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-trends-report/id1896763846?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) or [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033jcZwbZNGKpeUTRJvt1J?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and it's waiting before you open the laptop. I do the production end of this for food and beverage brands: short form video, stills, carousels, the actual footage. If your comment section is more interesting than your feed, [message me on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galluccinet?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).