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Protein Works · UK direct-to-consumer sports nutrition · Paid social product campaign
PROTEIN WORKS
Protein Works approached McGill Productions with a clear challenge: build on the success of an earlier campaign with a new social series focused on taste, texture, and indulgence. The team needed content that could bring the brand's premium ingredients and flavours to life in a way that felt immersive, aspirational, and instantly engaging across social media.
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BRIEF
Protein Works is a £50m direct-to-consumer sports nutrition brand that has sold over 500 million shakes. Following our earlier Davey-Award-winning campaign together, the team returned with a new brief: create a sensory-led social campaign to make their products feel premium, indulgent and impossible to scroll past.
In sports nutrition, brands compete on flavour as much as performance, but the category often struggles to communicate indulgence in a way that is appetising. Protein Works wanted to make the experience of consuming its products just as visible as the products themselves. The challenge was to create short-form assets that felt rich, flavour-led and contemporary, while standing up against the highest-quality food and lifestyle content on social media. The objective was to reinforce the brand's premium position in a crowded category while delivering paid social content built to perform across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Built for Protein Works' core fitness audience and its growing wellness customer base, including weight-conscious, plant-based and GLP-1 consumers, McGill produced the master films and platform cuts, while the Protein Works team handled paid deployment across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
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01 // PRE-PRODUCTION
We refined a visual strategy built around colour, texture and close-up detail. The creative focused on making each product feel full-bodied and sensory on screen, with a strong emphasis on movement, ingredients, and finish.
We used slow motion, extreme close-ups, and carefully controlled product interaction to draw attention to taste, texture, and quality. The aim was to create content that felt immersive throughout.
We chose a modern home location that felt aspirational but not unattainable. Props were selected to track Protein Works' contemporary identity and reinforce the premium tone throughout.
Production took place over two days in Lancaster. Gabriela Rolande returned from the previous Protein Works campaign, with her role designed to support the product story rather than dominate it. The focus stayed firmly on the products and how they looked, moved, and felt in use.
To push the visual treatment further, McGill Productions used a probe lens to capture highly detailed close-up shots and a fish tank setup to create more dynamic splash moments with ingredients such as milk, chocolate, and fruit. These techniques helped give the campaign a stronger visual identity and made the content feel more premium and tactile.
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In post-production, McGill Productions shaped the footage into a social campaign using dynamic, often fast-paced editing, cut with slow-motion sequences and subtle brand integration.
Music and pacing were used carefully to keep the campaign feeling rich, upbeat, and visually distinctive throughout.
'Indulge Your Taste Buds' extended Protein Works' premium creative into a second campaign. The brand has now returned to McGill Productions for six campaigns to date building on the same indulgence-led visual language.
Earlier work in the series reached over 9.5M views and won Silver at the 2024 Davey Awards in the Products & Services Campaign category, with further recognition at the Prolific North Creative Awards 2025.
For consumer brands selling sensory or taste-led products, the question 'what does this actually feel like to use?' is the one most product videos skip.
Closing that gap through deliberate production choices, and treating each product as its own short story rather than batching them into a generic brand reel, consistently outperforms more conventional product advertising on paid social.