The Power of Lifestyle Creative in Sponsored Brands

Opportunity

After launching at Walmart in 2024, La Chona engaged Matrixx CPG, a Walmart Connect Partner Network Premium Agency Partner, and expanded its investment by over 30% in the first half of 2025. In a competitive category, they wanted to find ways to help increase brand awareness.

Goals

They set out to improve their click-through rate, boost their conversion rate and increase ROAS.

Solution

The brand saw an opportunity to test whether lifestyle-based creative in Sponsored Brands placements can boost performance. They launched a campaign using Sponsored Brands’s new custom images feature to deliver visually compelling ads that showcased their products with recipe imagery, exceeding campaign goals.

Strategy and tactics

La Chona’s core objective was to improve CTR, CVR and ROAS. Matrixx CPG used lifestyle images of promoted products within the Sponsored Brands ad unit. This new feature let them showcase their products in real-life context via lifestyle images, capturing customer attention, inspiring action and driving stronger engagement and sales.

The Sponsored Brands custom image test campaign significantly outperformed expectations, surpassing both internal benchmarks and historical Sponsored Brands results.

Compared with prior 2025 Sponsored Brands campaigns, which only included their brand logo, the brand’s campaign using lifestyle creative helped deliver greater outcome.

Campaign dates: May 26 – June 19, 2025

Big wins

+ %

CTR

+ %

Conversion rate

+ %

ROAS

Source: Walmart first-party data, May 26–June 19, 2025.

Key takeaways

Impactful creative can improve ad performance: Moving from logo-only to lifestyle imagery can boost engagement and help lift ROAS.

Small creative optimizations help drive bigger ad impact: Simple imagery changes can improve campaign results, helping future advertising decisions through scalable testing and insights across the shopping journey.

Lifestyle imagery can boost awareness: With Sponsored Brands custom image capability, brands can capture Walmart customers’ attention in a more meaningful way.

Creative testing helps prove ad performance lift: By keeping keyword and item strategies constant, advertisers can see campaign results are driven by the ad’s custom image enhancements.

Create ads that influence purchase decisions: Work with a Premium Agency Partner from the Walmart Connect Partner Network, like Matrixx CPG, to develop ads that help encourage customers to choose your brand.

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