How a 100-Year-Old Australian Oil Brand Got the Country to Pay Attention Again

This Mission

Penrite Oil was turning 100. A century of Australian-made motor oil, earned through workshops and race tracks and the back blocks of the country. The centenary was a slated to be The Moment for the brand — the kind you only get once — and the question was how to make it mean something to regular punters in market before it passed.

The brief was to help bring Penrite Oil back into contention, when motorists stood at the motor oil shelf at Supercheap Auto or Repco. We needed the kind of awareness that would make people reach for Penrite Oil without a second thought.

That's a longer game than most digital campaigns are asked to play. And it requires a different kind of patience.

This Outcome

Motor oil is not a category people think about very often. They think about it when something goes wrong, or when a service is due, or when they're standing in Supercheap Auto trying to remember what their mechanic told them. The rest of the time, the category doesn't exist for them at all.

Which means the job of a brand campaign for Penrite isn't to catch people at the moment of purchase. Most of them aren't there. The job is to be present and memorable in the long stretch of time before that moment arrives — so that when it does, Penrite Oil comes to mind first.

That's what shaped the strategy. Working with Good One Creative, we built a full-funnel digital campaign across Meta, Google, YouTube, and premium connected TV. The goal was sustained presence across the places where Penrite's audience — car enthusiasts, mechanics, motorsport fans, working Australians who take their vehicles seriously — actually spent their time.

The campaign launched in October, front-loaded around the Bathurst 1000. The brand is the naming-rights sponsors of the Grove Racing outfit – Penrite Racing, and Bathurst is the race that matters. Every Australian with an opinion about cars has one about Bathurst. We went heavy into market around race week by design, knowing the race would generate attention that a well-positioned brand could ride.

And Penrite Racing won the greatest race in Australian motorsport. In the kind of finish that gets talked about for years.

We doubled-down and amplified the campaign overnight. Good One Creative moved fast, the win became content, and I pushed it back into market while the story was still alive. The campaign became a vehicle for something unplanned and considerably more powerful — fame generation that usually takes months of careful media work to manufacture. This time, it landed in our laps and we we're primed and ready to move, quick!

Phase 2 began in January and ran through February. By that point the campaign had been in market for three months, and the high-production brand film that had launched it — the right call at the start — was beginning to show the wear that any piece of creative eventually shows after sustained exposure. Audiences had seen it. They'd absorbed it. It had done its job.

What the data showed, clearly, across both phases, was that lo-fi content consistently outperformed polished production on social. These weren't produced to look like ads. Instead, they were stories worth watching, which on social media is a meaningful distinction. The platform rewards content that earns attention rather than demanding it.

Les Hart's trucking story attracted 28% of total YouTube impression share across the ambassador content — because the platform kept backing the thing people kept watching. The underdog stories, the grassroots racing content, the real voices with genuine stakes were the creative formats that generated the highest engagement rates across the entire campaign, sometimes exceeding 60% engagement on individual pieces.

The brand film remained the spine of the campaign. The ambassador content and lo-fi formats gave it a pulse. Used together, across a sustained five-month period, they did what brand campaigns are supposed to do: they built Penrite into a more prominent part of the consideration set for the people who will eventually need to choose a motor oil.

This Impact

Across both phases, the campaign ran for five months and delivered over 42 million ad impressions across digital channels.

Phase 1 delivered 30 million impressions over 90 days and Phase 2 delivered a further 12 million impressions across January and February.

The figure I find most telling is this: branded Google search impression share — the rate at which Australians were actively searching for Penrite Oil — correlated at 43% with paid media delivery across Phase 1. As the campaign ran, search volume for the brand grew with it. Brand advertising was building demand, and that demand was showing up in measurable behaviour.

Because we used creative that is bespoke to Meta (without forcing a TVC onto the platform), the CPM achieved on Meta was 63% below the industry benchmark, even despite 5 months of sustained activity. The diversified media buy — across platforms and across funnel stages — kept costs stable through Black Friday and into the Christmas period, when most brands see significant spikes in the cost of advertising.

Penrite Oil sells through retail partners. Repco. Supercheap Auto and others. The mechanics and trade suppliers across the country who stock and recommend lubricants every day. There's no add-to-cart button. There's no direct conversion to optimise for. The measure of success for a campaign like this is whether the brand is more famous at the end of it than it was at the beginning — whether more people, in more places, have Penrite somewhere in their minds when the moment to choose eventually arrives. By every signal available to us, it is.

Services

• Full-funnel digital media strategy (Phase 1 & 2)
• Campaign planning and media buying (Meta, Google, YouTube, BVOD/Connected TV)
• Real-time campaign optimisation
• Post-Bathurst win reactive campaign pivot
• Attribution and branded search analysis
• Creative performance reporting and strategic direction
• Collaboration with Good One Creative (creative production)