A specialty roaster whose craft happens out of sight, filmed where it actually shows — putting the brand in front of 800K–1.5M people across Meta and TikTok.

Coffee is the most photographed drink in Singapore and one of the least distinguishable. A flat white shot from above on a timber table is not a piece of content, it is a genre — the same frame produced daily by every café in the country, and by most of their customers. Worse for a roaster, the part of the business that actually earns the price sits behind the counter and further back than that: green buying, roast profiles, the calibration that makes a cup taste the same on a Tuesday as it did on Saturday. None of that photographs. What is left to say out loud is the vocabulary everybody already uses — single origin, small batch, ethically sourced — and a claim that every competitor also makes has stopped working as a claim.

The business asks the channel to do two jobs at once, and they pull in different directions. One is a destination decision: an all-day café competing for a Saturday morning against a dozen equally pleasant alternatives, settled in seconds and usually in favour of whichever place came to mind first. The other is a craft argument: beans, brewing gear and wholesale relationships that only move if people believe this roaster knows more than the next one. A feed that sells only brunch quietly teaches its audience that the coffee is incidental. A feed that talks only in roast profiles and origin notes speaks past the ninety percent who just want to know where to eat. Meanwhile the category refills constantly — new cafés, new roasters, new subscription brands — so being established is no protection. A brand can be widely known and still fall out of the shortlist people actually choose from, which is a harder problem than obscurity because it does not look like one.

Get the brand in front of a large share of the Singapore market and keep it there long enough for recognition to harden into recall. Reach was the primary measure, but reach on its own is the easiest number in marketing to buy and the easiest to fool yourself with — impressions accumulate whether or not anybody registered them. Views were the second measure precisely because a view is evidence that something held a person for a moment rather than simply passing them.

The third was the constraint that shaped everything else. Engagement rate and reach normally trade off against one another: the harder a campaign pushes into cold, broad audiences, the smaller the proportion of people who respond, and an awareness budget can always be spent into a big number that means nothing. The brief set a floor — engagement above 2% while reach ran high — which made the engagement rate a quality control on the reach rather than a separate goal. In practice that ruled out the cheap version of the campaign and put the burden back on the creative: it had to be good enough to get a reaction from people with no existing relationship to the brand.

We took over social media management and rebuilt the channels around the two audiences instead of averaging them. Video, photography and design were produced on site and on a continuous cycle rather than in occasional batches: the roastery as well as the counter, beans moving through the drum, the grinder being dialled in at open, the pour, the pass, the tables at the hour they are actually full. The craft material was shot to be watched rather than explained — process, hands and sound doing the work that adjectives had been failing to do — and the food was shot as the reason to come rather than as a garnish on the coffee. Vertical video carried most of the volume, cut to land its point inside the first second and to stay readable with the sound off, and each run was re-edited for the surface it was going to instead of one master edit being pushed everywhere.

On top of that organic base we ran awareness campaigns across Meta and TikTok, promoting cuts that had already proved they could hold an audience organically rather than commissioning separate ad creative. That single decision is what made the engagement floor survivable once spend scaled: the ads were the material with the best odds of earning a response, not the material designed to be an ad. Budget went to broad Singapore audiences weighted towards the catchments the café genuinely draws from, and it moved continuously — anything that held its engagement rate as reach expanded got more, anything whose response collapsed the moment it left warm audiences was retired inside days. Running alongside, influencer collaborations with local food, coffee and lifestyle creators put the brand into feeds it could not reach as itself, hosted in the café and filmed in each creator’s own voice rather than to a script. The three parts compounded: what creators reacted to told us what to film next, what performed organically became the ad, and the ads carried the strongest of it out to people who had never walked past the door.

Over five to six months the work reached 800K–1.5M people and delivered 1.5–2.5M views, with engagement holding above 2% while reach ran high. The pairing is the point: a specialty roaster and café in front of a substantial share of the market, with the people it reached still responding at a rate that broad awareness campaigns usually surrender in order to get the reach in the first place.

See the rest of our client work on the case studies page.