BLOGNestlé NESQUIK Finds the Betweenagers in All in the Making
Nestlé NESQUIK and McCann Canada launched "All in the Making" in July 2021, a multimedia campaign spanning television, social media, and digital channels that introduced Canadian parents to the concept of "Betweenagers" — children too old for toddler brands yet too young for teen culture — to relaunch a reformulated range of flavored milk syrups and powders.
The campaign arrived at a precise commercial moment. McCann was awarded the NESQUIK account in 2020, as reported by Clapboard, and the agency's first major work for the brand coincided with a product reformulation that removed all artificial flavors, colors, and sweeteners from NESQUIK syrups and powders while enriching the range with iron and vitamins A, B3, and C, according to Newswire Ca. A new NESQUIK Vanilla Syrup joined the lineup at the same time, broadening the flavored milk offering for Canadian families. The campaign published in Canada in July 2021, with the launch date of July 6 coinciding directly with the product relaunch announcement, per newswire.ca.
The tagline "It's All in the Making" operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface it references the physical act of mixing NESQUIK powder or syrup into a glass of milk — one of those small domestic rituals that children carry into adulthood as sensory memories. At a deeper register, as noted by Ads of the World, the phrase connects to NESQUIK's role across a child's development, positioning the brand not merely as a drink ingredient but as a quiet participant in growing up. Eryn Pasut, Marketing Director at Nestlé Beverages, stated the ambition plainly, telling Adnews on July 6, 2021: "Nesquik is such a nostalgic brand and it was important to us that we create a product that parents could feel good about sharing with their kids." The campaign ran across Canada as a film-led, multimedia effort and contains five media assets, as documented by Ads of the World. It was submitted to the industry record by Shana Blackman, Communications Manager at McCann Worldgroup.
BLOGNESQUIK identified an underserved audience segment it named "Betweenagers." This group occupies the developmental corridor between early childhood and early adolescence — an age cohort that mainstream food and drink marketing consistently overlooks, treating children as either small kids or proto-teens with little acknowledgment of the liminal space between. The campaign launched approximately 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, as reported by Clapboard, a period during which Canadian family routines had been compressed into the home and parents were acutely conscious of what their children were consuming and how they were spending their time.
Strategy magazine described the campaign on July 9, 2021 as reconnecting parents with NESQUIK through nostalgia while simultaneously introducing them to the Betweenager as a recognisable life stage. Pasut elaborated in Strategy that the brand intended to help parents "see the world through the eyes of their child" and draw on NESQUIK's roughly 70-year history in the Canadian market. That heritage is significant: NESQUIK began as Nestlé Quik in the United States in 1948, according to Wikipedia, and the brand name was standardised globally to Nesquik in 1999, per Kids Kiddle Co, giving it generational depth that few non-alcoholic drinks brands in Canada can match.
The competitive landscape for flavored milk in Canada is active. Danone competes in the broader dairy-nutrition space, and Arla Foods maintains a presence in value-added dairy, but neither has pursued a life-stage-specific creative positioning comparable to the Betweenager concept. The reformulated recipe — free of artificial additives and enriched with micronutrients — addressed the clean-label expectations that have reshaped parental purchasing behaviour in Canada's food and drink category, giving the campaign both an emotional and a functional argument to make simultaneously.
The campaign centres on a film-led creative approach that uses the tactile, everyday act of mixing flavored milk as its primary visual and emotional anchor. The "Betweenager" construct gave the creative team at McCann Canada a specific human truth to dramatise — that moment of small but genuine independence when a child makes something for themselves. The work leans into sensory memory and domestic warmth rather than spectacle, a tonal choice that suits both the product category and the parental audience the campaign needed to persuade alongside the child viewer.
One of the five media assets documented by Ads of the World is specifically titled "Nesquik Betweenagers Piano 06sE," a short-form social cut formatted at 4x5 aspect ratio, indicating deliberate production planning for vertical and square social feeds alongside the television master. The 6-second duration of that particular asset reflects a sophisticated understanding of how attention is rationed differently across platforms — a consideration that points to a campaign architecture built for multi-channel fragmentation rather than a single broadcast idea ported awkwardly to digital.
The campaign's visual grammar, as reflected in its submitted assets and the product's reformulation story, positions NESQUIK as a brand that has grown up alongside its audience without abandoning the warmth that made it resonant in the first place. Production credits for "All in the Making" are not publicly documented beyond the agency attribution to McCann Canada and the submitting communications manager Shana Blackman of McCann Worldgroup. The creative idea — coining "Betweenagers" as a cultural category — is itself a craft decision, using invented but immediately legible language to give journalists, parents, and social media audiences a shareable conceptual hook that extends the campaign's organic reach beyond its paid media investment.
No independently verified performance data for "All in the Making" — including sales uplift, brand-tracking shifts, or media efficiency metrics — is publicly available at the time of writing. What the public record does confirm is that one of the campaign's short-form assets, the "Nesquik Betweenagers Piano" social cut, accumulated 3,583 views as documented on Ads of the World, a modest but traceable indicator of the film's circulation within the industry archive ecosystem.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates meaningful effectiveness logic. The Betweenager concept gave editors and journalists a distinct angle: Strategy magazine covered the launch directly on July 9, 2021, and Adnews reported on the product reformulation news on July 6, 2021, suggesting the campaign generated earned media attention at launch. The clean-label reformulation — no artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners, plus added micronutrients — gave the campaign a functional credibility layer that purely emotional nostalgia advertising cannot provide alone. In Canada's flavored milk category, where parental scrutiny of ingredient lists has increased, that dual emotional-functional structure is well-calibrated.
The campaign also benefited from precise timing. Launching in July 2021, approximately 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic as reported by Clapboard, it reached Canadian parents at a moment when domestic rituals and family food choices carried heightened emotional weight. The Clapboard Score for "All in the Making" is 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign with a genuinely original strategic idea and a clean creative concept that is limited in its documentable impact by the absence of public performance verification.
"All in the Making" is a 2021 Canadian campaign by Nestlé NESQUIK and McCann Canada. It launched in July 2021 across television, social media, and digital channels to reintroduce NESQUIK to Canadian families. The campaign introduced "Betweenagers" as a life-stage concept and coincided with a product reformulation removing artificial flavors, colors, and sweeteners.
Betweenager refers to a child too old for toddler brands but too young for teen culture. McCann Canada coined the term for the 2021 NESQUIK relaunch in Canada to identify an underserved audience segment that mainstream food and drink advertising consistently overlooks, giving the campaign a distinct and shareable conceptual hook backed by a reformulated product.
Nestlé reformulated NESQUIK syrups and powders to remove all artificial flavors, colors, and sweeteners, according to newswire.ca. The updated recipe added iron and vitamins A, B3, and C. The reformulation addressed growing parental demand for cleaner-label food and drink products in Canada and provided the All in the Making campaign with a functional credibility argument alongside its emotional nostalgia positioning.
McCann Canada created "All in the Making" for Nestlé NESQUIK. McCann was awarded the NESQUIK account in 2020, as reported by Clapboard, and the campaign was submitted to the industry record by Shana Blackman, Communications Manager at McCann Worldgroup. It represents McCann Canada's first major creative work for the NESQUIK brand following the account win.
The campaign ran across television, social media, and digital advertising in Canada, as documented by Ads of the World and Clapboard. It contains five media assets, including a 6-second vertical social cut formatted at 4x5 ratio, indicating deliberate production planning for platform-specific formats rather than a single broadcast execution adapted for secondary channels.
The Clapboard Score for "All in the Making" is 63 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign with a genuinely original strategic concept — the Betweenager life stage — and a clean creative execution. The rating is moderated by the absence of publicly verified performance data, limiting assessment of the campaign's measurable commercial impact in the Canadian market.
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