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The emergence of Roblox is often compared to the arrival of Instagram for speaking to the next generation. So naturally, the next stage of marketing on the maturing metaverse platform is sponsored content and its own version of influencer partnerships.
Enter the “integration” era, in which brands are temporarily appearing in existing Roblox worlds through “pop-up” experiences. Instead of creating their own branded world or selling items via the avatar marketplace, this new flavour of Roblox appearance leverages existing audiences for a limited time to promote a specific campaign or test the Roblox waters with a lighter commitment. They might appear via a new branded storefront or offer a branded mini game, among other challenges, depending on the theme of the world in which they are appearing.
For a month last autumn, L’Oréal Paris brought its campaign against street harassment, called “Stand Up”, to the popular Livetopia experience on Roblox (pictured at top), which attracts an average 122 million visitors each month, according to the Geeiq dashboard, and lets people go to the movies, shop and attend sporting events and concerts. Adidas also recently created an integration within the fashion styling game Fashion Klossette that opened last year. (Founder Karlie Kloss tested the idea as an integration in five popular creators’ worlds in 2022.) Maybelline New York appeared in an experience called Splash, which is themed around music; it invited visitors to try 3D makeup looks, create graffiti in the Splash graffiti room (using digital makeup products) and remix a new song by DJ Kai. Versace appeared in LensCrafters’s Roblox “Eye Odyssey” experience, and a virtual Mango store appeared in Outfit Shopping Mall.
“If the social media equivalent of persistent experiences is having your own Instagram profile, an integration is like working with an influencer who already has a large community, like Kim Kardashian — you’re going to work with her to create content on her Instagram stories to distribute to her audience. This is more campaign driven,” says Charles Hambro, co-founder and CEO of Geeiq, a metaverse insights platform that works with top brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Gucci to create and measure Roblox experiences.
Kloss’s Designer Showcase integrations — which ultimately led to the persistent experience Fashion Klossette — were seen as a “trial run” to gain insights into the audiences and the design processes while connecting with Roblox audiences, says Annalora Von Pentz, VP of creative at investment and advisory agency Copper, which worked with Kloss on her Roblox projects. One of the most successful, a project to recreate a Carolina Herrera runway gown with platform creator Lovespun, put Carolina Herrera “on the map” in Roblox and triggered a ripple effect in terms of press and conversation about the bridge between digital and physical, Von Pentz adds. Because of the trust built through this project, the brand was able to successfully follow it up with a competition for creators to design their own bottle of Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl fragrance — the winning design was made into a physical bottle.
Brand integrations on Roblox increased in 2023 anywhere from 110 per cent (Geeiq analysis) to 124 per cent (according to Roblox). They are also growing at a faster rate than brand experiences, suggesting more to come this year. (While integrations are also popular in other metaverse world platforms, such as Fortnite, Decentraland and Zepeto, Roblox is by far the most popular and developed in terms of this new trend.)
“Brands are able to engage some of their most coveted consumer audiences, such as Gen Z, which makes up nearly half of our community and often spend several hours on the platform daily,” says Winnie Burke, global group director of fashion and retail partnerships at Roblox. As of late last year, nearly half of Roblox’s daily active users (DAU) — about 34 million people — are Gen Z, according to the company. It also saw overall DAU and hours engaged up more than 20 per cent each in 2023, compared to 2022.
While Burke notes that more brands are still creating their own persistent spaces (the term used for ongoing, standalone Roblox worlds), Roblox has identified a growing opportunity for brands to integrate into existing community-created experiences. “This form of collaboration offers a lower barrier entryway to engage our community within 3D places they already enjoy exploring together with friends,” she says, while generating brand awareness.
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Gaming continues to grow as an opportunity for brands to reach active and engaged audiences, with luxury brands such as Gucci and Ralph Lauren all taking part. Time spent in gaming worlds like those hosted by Roblox is predicted to increase in the next few years, while time spent in social media is levelling off, according to a 2024 report by experiential marketing agency Activate.
Similar to how sponsored content and influencer content work on social media, brand integrations are typically negotiated between the creator of the account or the world, not the hosting platform. And also like with influencer marketing, there is often an agency involved, Hambro says, meaning the agency that worked on the world will oversee these brand appearances. Century Games, for example, is the owner of Livetopia. The cost depends on the complexity and depth of the integration; a straightforward virtual shop would be less than a shop with a mini game inside it, he says. The measure of success typically lies in how much engagement the integration attracts, which tends to be more when it comes to deeper integrations.
“We’re now starting to see brands target particular experiences based on the audiences that those experiences command — very much like you would do in influencer marketing,” Hambro notes. “If you’re looking for a German audience, there will be experiences that over-index with German audiences that you should target.”
While Roblox isn’t directly involved in the integration in terms of payment or technology, the company can work with creators to identity potential brand integrations, can recommend top experiences and developers to brands (based on relevancy and authenticity to the brand) and can advise brands on how best to promote the experience, Burke says. “There’s so much opportunity to proliferate, given the breadth of community engagement.”
The developers also benefit because they can earn additional revenue and entice visitors with new content from desirable brands. Competition for attention is high: Roblox’s top 10 games account for about 30 per cent of players’ time. Payout can be high: in 2023, almost 100 Roblox titles reached at least $1 million in sales each, and Roblox paid creators a total of more than $740 million. Integrations with fashion and beauty brands are especially well suited, because of the option to offer Roblox wearables. Developers see such collaborations as a “win-win”, Burke says, because the audience can “interact with a brand through new and fresh content that offers incremental value”, and often the brand’s promotional activity helps boost awareness of the experience overall. “We see more and more community developers seeking these kinds of collaborations.”
Entering new environments, including Roblox, comes with considerable risk for brands. Just as with new social media platforms, they must navigate new cultures and norms. While integrations often lean on the experience’s creators for guidance on their approach, brands are still tackling how to price out, and measure, this new form of marketing, and there are no standard rates — similar to the early days of influencer marketing. Sometimes, in working with ad agencies, the Roblox appearance can be integrated into a broader existing campaign or partnership, and the project is measured in terms of media coverage as opposed to more formal metrics like engagement and time spent.
Century Games CTO Xiang Shen advises that brand integrations should be “as organic as possible” to add value. The company’s Livetopia, for example, is all about role playing in a virtual city, so brand experiences need to play into that theme. L’Oréal’s Paris Fashion Week show, for example, invited people to walk a virtual runway; visitors have also been able to drive a Lego-branded car. “People embrace that, especially if it’s a brand they know, and we see user engagement increase from such activations.”
The L’Oréal’s Stand Up integration in Livetopia overachieved internal and external benchmarks, according to L’Oréal Paris global CDO Visna Lim. “With several millions of experience visits, we were not only able to drive mass awareness, but we were able to generate deep engagement with this new audience.” Lim adds that visitors retrieved a few million of L’Oréal Paris’s branded avatar items, and that the brand saw “outstanding” time spent on its “Le Défilé Walk Your Worth” runway show experience. Key learnings, Lim says, were that the experience created authenticity and credibility.
Expect more experiments in virtual spaces, especially with the advent of VR devices such as the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest, further boosting the emotional storytelling capabilities of immersive experiences. While there are currently more than 300 million active users on major virtual world platforms, this is expected to double by 2026, according to Activate.
Roblox is also becoming more sophisticated in the ways that popular developers can monetise their popularity; it recently introduced an immersive programmatic ads platform to allow world creators to sell ad space for video ads and portal ads. The ad content that appears is targeted to each specific user, similar to web ads. Think of it as a “very light-touch integration”, Hambro says, that is very scalable and very easy. Still, if the ongoing dominance of influencer marketing is any indication, integrations aren’t going anywhere.
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