Nutrafol Put the Before and After on Emmy Night and Took the Claim Out

Listen to this episode of The Daily Trends Report, then use the piece below.

Eddie sent me a Nutrafol spot off the E! red carpet feed last night and I watched it three times before I could name what was off about it.

The 78th Emmys ran Monday night on NBC out of the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Nutrafol bought into Live with E!, the red carpet coverage, with a campaign called Be An After, built by the agency nice&frank. Three spots. Every one of them opens on the same before-and-after photo pair the hair category has been running since before any of us had a phone, and then the voice over goes backwards and tells you the person in those pictures felt different long before anybody took the after picture. Postpartum recovery in one. A divorce in another. Marathon training in the third. A custom social segment rides along with E! correspondent Zanna Roberts Rassi talking about her own time on the product. Andrea Michelson wrote it up for Adweek Monday morning, ahead of the broadcast.

The trade read is craft. Patrick Newman, one of the creative directors at nice&frank, told Adweek that turning before and after into be an after is a shift "from a results-oriented POV to an emotional mindset." Nutrafol CMO Deena Bahri said it helps set realistic expectations around hair growth results. Everybody wrote the reframe. It is a good reframe.

Nobody put the claims file next to it.

Nutrafol is owned by Unilever, which took a majority stake in May 2022. On April 4, 2023, Truth in Advertising filed a complaint with the FTC and the FDA saying Nutrafol advertises its supplements as clinically proven to increase hair growth and prevent hair loss without FDA approval or competent and reliable scientific substantiation, pushes people into automatically renewing subscriptions without clearly disclosing the terms, and promotes through influencers without making sure they disclose the connection. TINA's class-action tracker carries three separate Nutrafol cases over language like medical grade, clinically proven and physician formulated. And in October 2021, the FTC put Unilever on the list of companies it formally reminded that a material connection between an endorser and a brand has to be disclosed clearly enough that a normal person understands it.

I could not locate any FTC or FDA enforcement action that came out of that complaint, and TINA's own timeline page has not been touched since October 2024, so read the file as filed and not as decided. I am also not going to tell you Nutrafol built this campaign because of it. Nobody at the company has said that, and I have no way to know.

Here is what I will say. A brand carrying that file does not accidentally spend Emmy-night money on a campaign whose entire mechanic is putting the results format on screen and then declining to make the results claim. The recognition stays. The assertion walks out the door. That is a legal position with a media budget stapled to it, and it is the most useful thing a food and beverage brand can steal this week.

Which brings me to the version of this lesson already going around, the one that says find the worn out format in your category and break one rule of it. Fine tactic. It will not save you. The voice over was making the claim. The before and after was furniture. You can run the format backwards, shoot it on 16mm, cut it on the beat, and if the line underneath still says visible results in ninety days, you have bought a more expensive version of the same exposure.

Read the order of operations instead. Bahri sat down with Adweek's Marketing Vanguard on June 5, three months before these spots ran, and the episode listed the before-and-after framework among its takeaways, moving people from shame and urgency to hope and accountability. The claim position came first. The creative fell out of it. Most brands run that in reverse, fall in love with a format and then find out in legal review what they have implied, which is how you end up rewriting a campaign eleven days before it ships.

Food and beverage has the identical problem wearing a different shirt. The worn out format in clean label is the two-panel ingredient comparison, count the lines, look how short mine is. Next to it sit the gut health transformation, the thirty day challenge, and the testimonial where a customer tells you what your product did for her energy. Every one of those carries an implied structure-function claim whether your copy says the words or not, and nobody grades you on whether you meant it. The two-panel shot is the worst of the bunch, because the comparison is the argument, and a comparison you never substantiated is the easiest thing in the world for a competitor to hand to somebody.

So do it in the order Nutrafol did it. Decide what you will not assert, write it down, and then go find the format whose recognition survives once the assertion comes out. That is a twenty minute meeting and a permanent asset.

Three things you can run today

1. The post. Paste this, fill the brackets, publish it as is.

"Somebody asked why we don't post before and afters.

Here is the honest answer. I can show you what goes in the [jar]. I can show you the farm it came off of and the week it got picked. I can't tell you what it will do for you, because I would be guessing and you would be the one finding out.

So we post the sourcing instead. Ask me anything about it and I will answer it down here."

2. The still. Your five ingredients laid out on the counter in the order they go into the batch, shot from directly overhead in window light. No board, no props, no hands, no finished product in frame. The whole point is that it reads as a row of nouns with no arrow in it. An arrow is a claim. A list is a list. Shoot it near midday on a surface you already own and do not grade it warmer than the room actually was.

3. The video. Twenty seconds, five shots, phone propped on a stack of books.

Shot one, 0 to 3. The finished product on a bare counter. Static, no voice over, no text.

Shot two, 3 to 8. Your hand slides one raw ingredient into frame beside it. Say what it is and where it came from. Nothing else.

Shot three, 8 to 12. Second ingredient, same move, same sentence shape.

Shot four, 12 to 17. Third one. Same.

Shot five, 17 to 20. Pull back until all four sit in frame together and say that is the whole list. Cut on the word list.

The rule that makes it work: nobody says the word results, nobody says a number of days, and nobody holds up a photograph of a person. You keep the recognition of the ingredient shot and you take the argument out of it.

Free move while you are already in there. Pull your last twenty posts and mark every one that shows a change over time. A before and an after, a day one and a day thirty, a jar fuller than it was. Then ask who substantiated the change. If the answer is nobody, you just found your exposure, and it cost you a cup of coffee.

We went at this on today's Daily Trend Report, along with Instagram's comms team mailing out a press release with the memes baked inside it and Hain Celestial selling off the international brands it spent twenty years collecting. The show is the briefing. This is the part you do something with. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

If your feed is the thing somebody squeezes in after lunch, and it looks like it, that is the work I do. Organic social for food and beverage brands. The strategy, the shooting, the posting, and somebody actually answering the people who show up in the comments. Find me on LinkedIn.