Case 02 / 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 (parent co.)
- Role
- Creative Director & Art Director
- Agency
- BBDO
- Period
- Confirm year
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
Add the production scale — number of shoot days, crew size per day
Where it landed
Social engagement rose 18% year over year, and the program contributed to sales growth for the parent brand's portfolio.
Define the 18% — engagement rate, total interactions, or follower growth — and tighten the sales claim
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.
Add the mechanic, the platforms it ran on, how long it was live, and entry volume
If you have the sweepstakes creative, this section should show it