Case 08 / Pure Protein
A year of
content, planned
in advance
A full-year social content calendar for Pure Protein — built from a strategy, executed through commissioned shoots, and delivered as more than a hundred assets across four platforms. I directed the plan and the productions that filled it.
- Client
- Pure Protein
- Role
- Creative Director & Art Director
- Agency
- BBDO
The brief
Pure Protein needed a social presence that ran on a plan instead of on whatever was in the product photography library that week. The ask was a full-year content calendar covering four platforms with very different appetites — LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — for a product that is, visually, a brown bar in a blue wrapper.
That last part is the real constraint. A protein bar has no colour range, no seasonal variants worth photographing, and no obvious motion. Anything interesting has to be built around it.
The approach
I planned the year as a set of repeatable content pillars rather than a list of one-off posts. A pillar can be re-shot every quarter with new props and still feel on-brand, which is what makes a calendar survivable — you're not inventing from zero every month, and the feed reads as one voice across a year.
Four pillars carried the calendar: seasonal moments, where the bar gets absorbed into a holiday or a time of year; recipe and usage, which answers "what else do I do with this" and pulls in the powder and shake SKUs; product as object, where the packaging itself becomes the graphic; and everyday occasions, which puts the product into ordinary moments rather than gym ones.
Deliberately, most of the work is overhead flat lay. It is the one format that photographs a bar well, scales from a phone screen to a LinkedIn card without re-cropping, and lets a stylist build an entire story in props around a small object. The shot lists were written to that format so a single shoot day could produce several weeks of the calendar.
What I made
As Creative Director I owned the calendar and the creative direction across the year. As Art Director I ran the productions: writing the shot lists, then hiring and directing the crews that executed them — photographers, models and talent, and stylists across hair, makeup, set and product.
The output was over 100 assets in four formats:
- Stills — flat lays, product hero frames, recipe scenes
- Animated — stop-motion and cinemagraph loops built for silent autoplay
- Video — short-form motion cut for feed and story placements
- Promotional — sweepstakes creative and its supporting posts
Where it landed
Social engagement rose 18% year over year, and the program contributed to sales growth for the parent brand's portfolio.
Over 100 assets, four platforms, one calendar — and an 18% lift in engagement across the year.
Seasonal moments
The bar stops being the subject and becomes a component of a holiday scene. Cheapest pillar to refresh — same product, new props — and reliably the highest-performing, because people engage with a season before they engage with a supplement.
Recipe & usage
The pillar that does commercial work. It answers what else the product is good for, which is how you sell powders and shakes to someone who came for a bar — and it gives the feed something to say that isn't a nutrition panel.
Product as object
Stop-motion and studio motion built for a feed that autoplays without sound. No set dressing, no talent — just the packaging, a saturated ground, and movement doing the work that a headline would otherwise have to do. These are the cheapest posts to produce and the fastest to read.
Free bars
for a year
The engagement mechanic built into the calendar — a sweepstakes offering a year's supply of Pure Protein bars to three winners.
Why it was in the plan
A content calendar can hold attention but it doesn't reliably generate participation. The sweepstakes was scheduled into the year specifically to spike engagement at a chosen moment rather than hoping for it — a prize large enough to be worth entering, limited to three winners so it stayed affordable, and framed around the simplest possible promise.