Can You Use Before and After Photos in GLP-1 Ads?

Which Meta policies still apply to a before-and-after image?

Three Meta policies apply to a before-and-after image at once, and the image only passes when all three do:

• Health and Wellness: adults-only targeting, no inferiority statements, no pinched-fat depictions, no clickbait outcome promises without disclaimers.
• Personal attributes: nothing in the ad may assert or imply the viewer's health, weight or medical condition, which rules out the classic caption that speaks to the viewer's own body.
• Drugs and Pharmaceuticals: an ad that promotes the prescription GLP-1 product, rather than the telehealth service, needs active LegitScript certification and Meta's authorization, with targeting limited to eligible countries and adults.

Meta's introduction to the Advertising Standards also still prohibits content implying or attempting to generate negative self-perception to promote diet, weight loss or other health-related products. A transformation image whose emotional argument is shame stays outside the rules even when every sentence is technically compliant. MedScale checks an image against all three policies and that self-perception rule before it runs.

What other imagery can GLP-1 ads use?

Before-and-after is now available, but the visual approaches that performed within the old rules did not stop working, and they carry no enforcement risk at all.

• Clinician and consultation imagery, which builds the credibility that drives conversion in regulated care.
• Product, packaging and unboxing, which communicates tangibility without depicting a person.
• Intake and app experience, showing how the program works rather than what it produces.
• Testimonial content about experience, such as convenience or clinician access, delivered without a comparison.

MedScale's own house rule is stricter than Meta's: the ads MedScale builds do not use before-and-after imagery at all. That is MedScale's choice, made to keep disapproval rates low across Meta, Google and TikTok at once, not a Meta rule, and a brand that uses the format within the policy is not breaking one. Dated changes to this policy and the others in this category are logged at /policy-tracker/changelog.

How do brands get before-and-after disapprovals by accident?

Most disapprovals in this area come from assets produced for other channels and reused without review, or from user-generated content a brand did not create.

• Affiliate and influencer content, where a partner posts a transformation with a shame-based caption that the brand then boosts.
• Organic social posts promoted later, which are reviewed under advertising policy the moment money is behind them.
• Testimonial videos where a customer describes their old body in terms Meta reads as an inferiority statement.
• Website galleries that an otherwise compliant ad points at, since the destination is reviewed too.

The common thread in accidental disapprovals is that nobody applied ad policy at the point the asset was made. MedScale pushes that check upstream into the brief and into partner guidelines rather than catching it at upload. For a brand with transformation assets already in circulation, MedScale's free Growth Audit lists the ads and pages most likely to be flagged under these rules.

Do compliant GLP-1 ads really underperform before-and-after ads?

Brands that ran transformation creative before the change often concluded that compliant creative underperforms. The comparison was usually unfair, because the non-compliant version had been optimized over many iterations and the compliant version was on its first. The same trap now runs the other way: a before-and-after ad that passes review on its first outing is not evidence that its copy will keep passing at scale.

MedScale treats each creative structure as its own testing surface with its own iteration budget, and tracks disapproval rate per structure. Judged that way, the gap between formats is smaller than a first test suggests, and the account is not accumulating enforcement risk in the meantime.