Protein Works came to us with a clear challenge: produce a summer campaign for their sports nutrition range that felt nothing like a product shoot. They needed a video production partner who could build a genuinely original creative concept around their products — and deliver it in time for peak season.
▶ Watch the Soundtrack to Your Summer campaign
The goal was simple: stop the scroll. Protein Works wanted health-conscious consumers to not just see their products on social media, but to feel them — bold, refreshing, indulgent, and distinctly seasonal. The campaign needed to cut through a saturated feed and perform across both organic and paid social formats.
The brief had an additional layer of complexity: the sports nutrition space is crowded, and most brands default to gym shots, transformation stories, and influencer endorsements. Protein Works wanted something different — something that would make their content unmistakable, even on silent autoplay.
We started in pre-production with a single creative conviction: sound could lead this campaign, not just support it. That idea became Soundtrack to Your Summer.
Our team built bespoke soundscapes in-house for every clip in the series — blending diegetic sound captured live on set (cracks, fizz, pours) with carefully constructed foley, whooshes, and ambient layers designed to evoke sun-drenched patios, cold shakes hitting hot glass, and the crisp snap of a protein bar mid-break.
The production pushed into technically ambitious territory. We used probe lenses to capture hyper-detailed close-ups — condensation on glass, the texture of a protein bar, the burst of a blended shake. Slow-motion rigs captured the kinetic energy of summer. A custom-built fish tank setup created the distinctive underwater pour moments the campaign became known for. Every visual decision was made in service of the audio story — a deliberate creative reversal from the industry norm.
On set, we shot with sound in mind from the first frame, treating each clip like a short film rather than a product ad. In post-production, we refined the soundscape to frame each flavour as a sensory experience — building rhythm into the edit so audiences felt the moment before they had consciously registered what they were watching.
The campaign generated 9.5M+ views across social platforms, putting Protein Works' content in front of an audience few nutrition brands reach through standard content calendars.
It won a Silver award at the Davey Awards — judged by creative leaders from Disney, MTV, and Condé Nast — and earned two shortlist nominations at the Prolific North Creative Awards 2025 in Social Content and Sound Design & Audio Branding.
Soundtrack to Your Summer has become one of our most-cited campaigns — not just for its reach, but for how clearly it demonstrated that audio-led creative can outperform visual-first approaches in a feed environment built around silent autoplay.
If you are looking for a social video campaign built around a real creative idea, get in touch with the McGill Productions team today.
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