A bakery whose product is at its best the hour it leaves the oven, filmed on that clock — putting the brand in front of 800K–1.5M people across Meta and TikTok.

Few things in Singapore are photographed more often than a pastry, and almost none of it works. A laminated pastry makes its case through qualities a still frame cannot carry — the shatter when it is cut, the pull of the crumb, the steam that exists for about a minute after it leaves the oven. Flattened into a photograph, an excellent croissant and an indifferent one are the same image, and a feed full of identical pastries simply teaches people to scroll past all of them.

The shape of the business compounded that. This is a walk-in bakery with counters people queue at: nothing is being sold on social, so the channel is not closing a transaction, it is deciding a destination. Its real job is to be the name that surfaces when somebody is working out where breakfast happens on a Saturday, or where to take a visiting friend for coffee — a decision made in seconds, against half a dozen alternatives, and usually settled in favour of whichever place is already in mind. Familiarity cuts both ways here. An established bakery can be widely known and still drift out of active consideration; people are aware of it without thinking about it, which is a harder problem than being unknown because it does not present as a problem. Meanwhile the category refills constantly with new cafés, new bakeries and delivery platforms bidding for the same appetite, and a menu that turns over seasonally meant anything filmed had a short useful life. There was no version of this that worked as one shoot stretched across a quarter.

Reach at a scale the category does not normally afford a bakery — and hold the quality of attention while getting there. Breadth came first: put the brand in front of a large share of the Singapore market, often enough that recognition turns into recall, not ‘I have heard of it’ but ‘let’s go there’. Views were the second measure, because a view is the evidence that the content held somebody rather than merely appearing in front of them.

The demanding part was the third. Engagement rate and reach ordinarily pull against each other: the further a campaign pushes into cold, broad audiences, the smaller the share of people who actually respond, and it is easy to buy a large reach figure that means very little. The brief was explicitly both — keep engagement above 2% while reach ran high — which ruled out the cheap version of an awareness campaign and forced the spend to sit behind creative that could earn a reaction from people with no prior relationship to the brand at all.

We took over social media management and ran the channels on the bakery’s clock rather than a content calendar’s. Video, photography and design were produced continuously and on site: dough being laminated and folded, trays going in and coming out, the cut through a pastry that is still warm, the counter at the hour it is busiest. Sound was treated as part of the product — the crack of a crust under a knife does more work than any adjective — while every cut stayed readable for the majority who watch with the sound off. Vertical video carried most of the weight, edited to make its point inside the first second, and each production run was re-cut for the surface it was going to instead of one edit being pushed everywhere. Seasonal and limited items were handled as events with a build-up rather than announcements posted once and forgotten.

On top of that organic base we ran awareness campaigns across Meta and TikTok, promoting creative that had already proved it could hold an audience rather than producing separate ad assets — which is what made the engagement target survivable at scale. Spend went to broad Singapore audiences, weighted towards the catchments the bakeries actually draw from, and budget moved continuously: cuts that held their engagement rate as reach expanded got more of it, and anything whose response fell away once it left warm audiences was retired quickly. Alongside the paid work we ran influencer collaborations with local food and lifestyle creators, hosting them in the bakeries and letting them film in their own voice, because a recommendation from an account somebody already follows does a job a brand account cannot do for itself. The three parts fed each other: what creators responded to shaped what we filmed next, what performed organically became the ad, and the ads carried the strongest material out to people who had never walked past a shop.

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. That combination is the harder of the two to buy: a neighbourhood bakery in front of a substantial share of the market, with the people it reached still responding at a rate broad awareness campaigns usually give up in order to get there.

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