A café everybody photographs and nobody narrates — taking the storytelling back from the backdrop and putting the brand in front of 800K–1.5M people across Meta and TikTok.

Being photogenic is not the advantage it sounds like. A dining brand built on setting — light, greenery, long tables, the sort of room people want to be seen in — ends up with an audience that produces more imagery of it than it could ever produce itself. That looks like free marketing until you notice what it actually does: the brand becomes a location rather than a name. The photograph travels, the room is recognised, and the caption is about somebody’s Sunday. Recognition accumulates without ever attaching to anything the business chose to say, and a brand that is famous as a backdrop has no way to introduce anything — not a menu, not an outlet, not a reason to come on a weekday.

The second problem is that the category’s aesthetic had been fully copied. The vocabulary of the beautiful all-day café — the plants, the natural light, the marble, the flat-lay brunch — is now the house style of an entire industry, produced daily by hundreds of venues and by their customers on top of that. Any single post is competing against a feed already saturated with near-identical frames, most of them good enough. In that environment a strong-looking post is not a differentiator; it is the entry fee. And the decision the content is meant to influence is a fast one. Where to eat on a Saturday, where to take visiting family, where to sit for three hours with a laptop — these are settled in seconds, from a shortlist people assemble without consciously assembling it. A brand that is admired but not top of mind loses those decisions quietly to whichever name surfaced first, and it loses them without any visible sign that something is wrong.

Put the brand in front of a large share of the Singapore market, on the brand’s own terms rather than through other people’s captions, and keep it there long enough that recognition turns into recall — the difference between people knowing the room when they see it and thinking of the name when they are deciding where to go. Reach was the primary measure of that. Views were the second, because reach alone only proves a post was served: it accrues whether or not anybody registered it, and an awareness budget can always be spent into a large number that means very little. A view is evidence that something held a person, however briefly, instead of passing them.

The third measure was the one that constrained the other two. Engagement rate and reach normally pull against each other — the further a campaign pushes into cold, broad audiences, the smaller the share of people who respond — so a floor of 2.5%+ engagement while reach ran high was not a separate target but a quality control on the reach itself. It ruled out the cheap version of the campaign, the one that buys impressions from audiences who will never react, and put the weight back on the creative: it had to be good enough to get a response out of people with no existing relationship to the brand, at the scale where that is hardest.

We took over social media management and changed what the channels were for. Instead of adding more of the imagery the audience was already generating, we used the feed to say the things a customer photograph structurally cannot: what is actually on the plate and why, which room suits which occasion, what changes with the seasons, what a weekday afternoon looks like as opposed to the Sunday everybody already posts. Video, photography and design were produced on a continuous cycle rather than in occasional shoots, and deliberately shot away from the flat-lay — food in motion and at eye level, the kitchen and the pass, service at the hours the rooms are genuinely full, the outlets treated as distinct places with different reasons to visit rather than as one interchangeable look. Vertical video carried most of the volume, cut to land inside the first second and to work with the sound off, and each cut 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 the cuts that had already proved organically that they could hold an audience rather than commissioning separate ad creative. That is the decision that made the engagement floor survivable once spend scaled: what went behind budget was the material with the best odds of earning a reaction, not material built to look like an ad. Budget went to broad Singapore audiences weighted towards the catchments each outlet actually 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 within days. Running alongside, influencer collaborations with local food and lifestyle creators placed the brand in feeds it could not reach as itself, filmed in each creator’s own voice and hosted across the outlets rather than defaulting to the most photographed one. The three parts fed each other: what creators gravitated towards 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 sat down.

Over five to six months the work reached 800K–1.5M people and delivered 1.5–2.5M views, with engagement holding above 2.5% while reach ran high. The combination is what matters: a brand that was already widely photographed put in front of a substantial share of the market in its own words, with the people it reached still responding at a rate that broad awareness campaigns usually give up in order to buy the reach in the first place.

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