Strategy Over Scale: How Catha Digital Turned 14 Creators Into 2.1M Views for Bakso AKJ

NICHE

Food & Beverage

Influencer & Partnership

Facebook

SERVICES

PLATFORM

Instagram

Tik tok

Strategy Over Scale: How Catha Digital Turned 14 Creators Into 2.1M Views for Bakso AKJ

The Background

Bakso AKJ had already earned its reputation the old-fashioned way. Word of mouth carried it, one satisfied table at a time, and the queues outside its Surabaya location were proof enough that the meatballs were doing their job. But the crowd walking through the door looked a little older every year, and Bakso AKJ knew it. Somewhere out there, an entire generation of Gen Z and Gen Alpha diners were scrolling right past a brand they had never even heard of.

Offline buzz alone was not going to close that gap. A great bowl of bakso does not sell itself on a For You Page, and a brand that stays confined to its neighborhood eventually gets outpaced by the next shop that figures out how to reach customers through a phone screen rather than a doorway. Bakso AKJ needed a digital breakthrough, something that could carry the same warmth people felt at the table into a format that a fifteen-year-old scrolling on the bus would actually stop for.

That is where Catha Digital came in, with a brief that was refreshingly simple to say and genuinely difficult to execute: make Bakso AKJ impossible to scroll past.

Plenty of brands treat influencer marketing as a numbers game, throwing a budget at whichever account has the biggest follower count and hoping the views follow. Catha Digital's team took the opposite approach. Instead of chasing reach for its own sake, they built a KOL roster designed the way a good bowl of bakso is built, layer by layer, with every ingredient earning its place.

The final lineup activated 14 creators across TikTok and Instagram: one macro KOL to give the campaign its initial lift, one micro KOL to bridge reach with relatability, and twelve nano creators chosen specifically for their strong, local, food-loving audiences. This was not a roster picked off a media kit. Every creator was matched to Bakso AKJ's story on purpose, so that the content felt less like an ad and more like a friend telling you where to eat this weekend.

The creative direction leaned hard into formats that already lived naturally in Gen Z and Gen Alpha feeds. One creator framed her visit as a “hidden gem” discovery in Gunung Anyar, East Surabaya, the kind of local food-scout content that thrives on relatability and curiosity. Another leaned into comedy, framing a bowl of bakso as day two of a diet that was clearly not going according to plan, a joke almost anyone who has ever tried to eat healthier could laugh at and immediately relate to.

The through-line across every piece of content was authenticity over polish. Each creator was given room to tell the story in their own voice, whether that meant a self-deprecating joke, a genuine hidden-gem reveal, or a straightforward taste test. That freedom is exactly what made the campaign feel less like sponsored content and more like a recommendation worth trusting.

Your Brand, Our Next Success Story

The Strategy

Every neighborhood has a Bakso AKJ: a business that already does the hard part right, the food, the service, the loyalty, but hasn't yet found its way into the feeds of the audience that will carry it into the future. With the right KOL strategy, that gap closes fast. Catha Digital turns real numbers into real impact, one well-matched creator at a time.

What Worked Well

Between June and July 2025, the campaign generated over 2.1 million views and more than 229,000 engagements across TikTok and Instagram, powered by the full roster of 14 KOLs. For a local F&B brand that had never run a coordinated influencer push before, those numbers marked a genuine shift, not just in visibility, but in who was now seeing Bakso AKJ for the first time.

The mixed-tier approach proved its worth here. The macro creator's reach opened the door, the micro creator kept the momentum credible, and the twelve nano creators did the quiet, compounding work of making Bakso AKJ feel like something already loved by people in their own community, not just a brand paying for attention. That combination is what carried the story past a single viral moment and into sustained, scroll-stopping visibility across two platforms at once.

For a brand that started this campaign worried about being invisible to a younger generation, the results spoke for themselves: millions of views, hundreds of thousands of engagements, and a queue that now has a much younger crowd in it too.