How Yorkshire Tea’s Cherry Bakewell Brew Became a Social Sensation

Client: Yorkshire Tea

Cherry Bakewell Brew was one of Yorkshire Tea’s most unexpected product launches. Inspired by a familiar tea-time classic but delivered in black tea form, it had the potential to spark curiosity, and scepticism, in equal measure.

The challenge was not simply to generate awareness, but to build credibility and drive meaningful commercial impact through paid social. Jaywing designed a performance-led paid social strategy that treated media as an adaptive system rather than a fixed buy. Creative variations were tested across Meta and TikTok, with budget dynamically reallocated based on real-time indicators including completed view rate, engagement quality and audience response. Short-form edits quickly emerged as the most efficient driver of attention, while taste-test content featuring Liam Charles in the town of Bakewell consistently generated the strongest interaction and profile visits. Across the ten-week campaign, paid social delivered 55 million impressions, 25 million reach and 11 million ThruPlays, significantly exceeding forecast benchmarks. Crucially, this performance translated into measurable brand and commercial outcomes. Cherry Bakewell Brew achieved the highest launch awareness of any Speciality Brew to date, alongside record purchase intent for the range. Awareness was particularly strong among younger and new-to-brand audiences, demonstrating incremental recruitment beyond Yorkshire Tea’s traditional base. By combining creative testing, dynamic optimisation and data-led budget allocation, paid social did not simply amplify the launch; it delivered the most commercially successful Speciality Brew introduction in the brand’s history.