The Entertainer, the UK's second-largest toy retailer, came into 2025 with a question that a lot of legacy retailers are asking in one form or another. How does a long-established brand become culturally relevant in a social landscape driven by entertainment, and do it in a way that still brings people through the doors of its shops?
While the retailer's broader social activity focused on engagement, awareness and in-store consideration, Favola saw an opportunity to build an organic content series capable of delivering disproportionate reach without any paid amplification behind it. What the agency arrived at was Real or Cake?, a recurring episodic series across The Entertainer's social channels featuring recognisable characters stocked in store, among them Elsa, Mario, George Pig and the Gruffalo.
The execution was intentionally simple, humorous and native to social. There were no expensive production techniques, no celebrity endorsements and no professional bakers, and the agency is direct about where the power came from, which was the strength of the idea itself.
An insight about sharing rather than shopping
The strategy rested on one observation about audience behaviour. People rarely share retail content, but they frequently share content that surprises them.
Rather than producing another product-focused post, Favola looked at emerging social behaviours and identified a trend that had already captured widespread public attention in the form of hyper-realistic cake creations. Combining that visual surprise format with The Entertainer's toy range created something highly shareable that sat naturally in the feed rather than interrupting it.
The concept worked because it appealed to several audience motivations at the same time: curiosity about whether the object is real or cake, participation in guessing before the reveal, surprise at the answer, and the impulse to send it to someone else. Every creative decision was optimised around shareability rather than promotion, because success depended on audiences distributing the content themselves through shares, reposts, comments and recommendations.
Many brands join a trending format hoping for a short-term spike in reach. Favola's argument is that it did something different by identifying the underlying behaviour that made the trend compelling, then attaching it to The Entertainer's most recognisable toys and characters, along with cake creations and cake failures that parents would find relatable. The result was a format that felt culturally relevant and was also ownable by the brand.
An episodic property rather than a one-off post
As engagement grew, the team kept refining the format based on audience behaviour and community response, working out which characters, reveals and editing styles generated the strongest reactions.
The episodic structure encouraged repeat viewing, with audiences returning for the next instalment and sharing earlier episodes with friends and family. Over time, Real or Cake? developed from a single content concept into a recognisable content property strongly associated with the brand.
It also challenged a convention in the category. Toy retailers typically rely on product launches, promotions and supplier assets to generate engagement, and this series made the case that entertainment can be a more powerful driver of discovery than product messaging alone. The toys were central to the content, but as the agency puts it, they were never the reason people watched. People watched because they were entertained.
What the series returned
Across the run, the campaign generated 34,842,000 organic views, 55,428 shares, 55,330 saves, 7,872 comments, 6,968 direct follows and 4,434 product taps.
More than 110,000 combined saves and shares indicate that audiences did considerably more than consume the content passively, actively distributing it to other people and returning to it later. Crucially, 90% of views came from people who did not already follow the account, which made the series a discovery mechanism rather than a way of entertaining an existing audience, and the campaign accumulated almost six years of watch time. Every one of those results was achieved without paid amplification.
Favola is a social-first agency of 20 people led by husband-and-wife team Sophia and Alex, founder and CEO respectively, and made up of social content creators, influencer and paid media specialists, a studio team and a strategist. The name is Italian for fable, which the agency links to what it calls Social with Substance, and it specialises in episodic, story-led content produced by in-house creators embedded in its clients' worlds, whether that is a toy shop, a bowling alley, a ferry or a show home.
The team's own reading is that the series proved creativity and community can still outperform media spend, and that the recognition sits with an ethos built on making a trend mean something to the brand rather than simply joining it. Real or Cake? is one part of Favola's continuing work with The Entertainer.
The winner of Community Strategy of the Year at the Social Media Marketing Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on 8 October in London.