When it comes to media of any significant scale, marketing is one of the most important tools one has to learn. After all, if you make this great creation, but no one is around to see it or knows it’s around, why should anyone care about it? The success of certain products relies on good marketing to “get out there” and bring people to the brand. Roblox is no different, and in fact, it’s in a constant battle between keeping the players that have helped it get 85 million daily users and trying to bring in brands to ensure that the game reaches beyond its “core audience.”
Enter Jerrett West, who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Roblox. In a chat with Ad Age via one of its podcasts, the CMO discusses the many avenues of marketing within this gaming universe and how the team is constantly trying to bring in brands to promote their products.
It’s a very big interview, so we recommend listening to it in full to get the full perspective from the CMO. However, many of the topics he discussed do pertain to major efforts within the game over the last year. For example, the dev team has been pushing hard for bigger and bigger brands to utilize their gaming space to promote their business or brand. To that end, there have been big “gets,” like the PGA making a special golf world to help inspire younger golfers, or companies like Chipotle doing commercials set in their world, or massive discount giveaways for events like Cinco De Mayo.
They even teamed with the MLB right before its new season started to bring in accurate uniforms for the players to deck their characters out in.
While all of this may seem “basic” for a universe like this, there is another avenue that can’t be ignored. That’s the fact that the game actually isn’t profitable. It’s true. Despite it having 85 million-plus players and microtransactions rolling in from all over the world, for better and for worse, the fact remains that the game doesn’t make money and had a huge loss in its last fiscal year.
That puts more pressure on the CMO to try and “bring in the money” so that it can balance out all the costs of keeping the game running and its players happy. In other words, the Chief Marketing Officer position is far more complex than you might think, and it’s a position that has to play the long game to succeed.
