Dive Brief:

• Agency network Dentsu collaborated with GeekOut and Kodansha Creators’ Lab to recently launch Robmix, a business focused on new entertainment opportunities related to Roblox and its users, per a press release.
• The trio will work to discover and develop the next generation of Roblox users and create new IP, content and media opportunities, including off-site merchandise and publications. 
• The new label comes out of  Dentsu’s House of Creators initiative, which was launched last year to support next-generation creators who create and share content on social platforms worldwide.

Dive Insight:

Dentsu’s move to entrench itself in Roblox culture and creators is a bet on the future of where entertainment and related marketing are going. The platform has 100 million daily active users globally who participate in adventures and games developed by the next-generation creators Dentsu is hoping to identify. U.S. in-game ad revenue is expected to top $11.5 billion by 2028, according to eMarketer, and Roblox, already one of the top platforms, is positioned to be a big winner.

The Robmix label will combine the capabilities and business assets of Dentsu with GeekOut, which helps brands and creators collaborate on Roblox content, and Kodansha, which publishes manga magazines. Together, they will focus on helping creators develop new IP, deploy existing IP on Roblox, support game creators who use other platforms to port their games to Roblox and create media opportunities outside of the platform.  

The move comes not only as the gaming space continues to grow but also as the marketing industry increasingly turns its focus to standardizing media opportunities in the fragmented ecosystem. Last month, the Interactive Advertising Bureau unveiled a set of standards for the gaming space, providing advertisers with a framework upon which they could evaluate their campaigns across platforms. The framework includes baseline metrics like impression count, click-through rate, average number of interactions per user and redemption rates that advertisers should expect for their gaming campaigns, as well as nice-to-have metrics such as brand recall, visual tracking, neurological evaluations and footfall. 

Roblox continues to attract the attention of digital marketers, including via partnerships with agency holding group WPP and e-commerce platform Shopify. Another popular gaming platform, Fortnite, also remains popular with marketers.