$7.5M in attributed sales. Not a creative achievement. An operational one.

The operational problem

Motor oil is a category nobody thinks about until they need it.

Castrol had a brand recognition problem that no amount of creative was going to fix. Potential customers knew the name, but passed on it — viewing it as a legacy brand with a premium price point. In a category where consumers go directly to the brand they want, buy it, and leave, there was no natural moment to reconsider. Motor oil is a low-engagement category. Customers don’t browse. They grab what they know.

The insight was behavioral, not creative: DIY automotive consumers are passionate about multiple product categories outside of motor oil — tools, storage, workout equipment, home improvement. Castrol’s audience was already shopping at Walmart. They just weren’t shopping for Castrol.

The challenge wasn’t making a better ad. It was building an operational infrastructure that could intercept these consumers in the categories they already cared about, and introduce Castrol at the point of highest engagement.

What was built

A multi-stakeholder retail media system — first of its kind in the category.

The program centered on a 360° shoppable hub on Walmart.com that cross-pollinated Castrol with the DIY product categories its target audience was already engaged with. The hub featured NFL athlete and Castrol spokesperson Larry Fitzgerald, whose garage was transformed into a fully interactive, shoppable destination — tutorial videos, product recommendations, and direct add-to-cart functionality across multiple Walmart departments.

This was not a media buy with a landing page attached. It was a platform-level integration that required coordinating across six operational layers simultaneously:

Why it worked

The infrastructure was the strategy.

Most retail media campaigns fail at coordination, not concept. The creative idea is fine. The media plan is fine. What breaks is the handoff between the brand team, the retailer’s platform team, the talent agency, the media buyers, and the merchandising leads. Without a governance system that assigns ownership at each stage, work stalls, approvals bottleneck, and the experience launches incomplete or late.

This program succeeded because the operating system was built before the experience was. Every stakeholder had a defined role. Every handoff had a single point of contact. Every approval moved through a documented stage gate — not through Slack threads and calendar holds.

This is where the Soren Rho methodology was forged. Managing this level of cross-functional complexity — brand team, retailer platform, talent coordination, media execution, merchandising — required building governance frameworks that didn’t exist yet. The systems designed during this engagement became the foundation for every Soren Rho engagement that followed.

The result was a program that launched on time across six coordinated workstreams, with no missed deliverables, in a category that had never attempted this level of integrated retail media execution.

Campaign walkthrough — Castrol × Walmart Connect

Measured outcomes

Every KPI surpassed. Every benchmark cleared.

Average time spent in the shoppable hub exceeded one minute — well above Walmart’s retail media benchmarks. The hub became one of Walmart’s top DIY destinations. New buyers accounted for more than half of all annual Castrol purchases through the platform.

The program won the MMA Smarties Global Gold and North America Gold awards for Integrated Ecommerce Innovation — recognition typically reserved for consumer-facing creative work. In this case, the award went to the system that made the creative work possible.