WPP eyes Gen Z audiences with new Roblox partnership

WPP and its media investment arm, GroupM, will join the Roblox Partner Program, alongside its competitor Dentsu, which was named as one of the program’s initial members when it was launched last year.

Through the partnership, Roblox will help WPP to develop new strategies for leveraging the platform as a creative channel, including partnerships with Roblox creators. The companies will also co-host a series of ’sprint days’ in which Roblox creators, agency strategists and developer studios will be brought together to collaboratively develop new activations on the platform.

“Roblox is an amazing platform for brands to engage creatively with a young, expanding and valuable audience,” Rob Reilly, chief creative officer at WPP, said in a statement. “By merging WPP’s creative firepower with Roblox’s innovative environment, we will continue to invent new and exciting ways for brands to connect with the next generation of consumers.”

Founded twenty years ago, Roblox has grown to become one of the world’s most popular online gaming platforms: it currently hosts around 79.5m daily active users, according to company data from Q2 of this year, and it claims that Gen Z is its fastest-growing user base. The company bills itself as a more engaging and authentic channel than social media and as a digital hub in which Gen Zers can experiment endlessly with virtual personas “to reflect their ever-changing identities,” according to its website.

While WPP is emphasizing Gen Z’s presence on the platform, the true value of its partnership with Roblox may lie in the potential to appeal to an even younger demographic, according to Jim Lecinski, proofessor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“This partnership between WPP and Roblox is an important way for brands to learn more about Gen Alpha“ – those born between 2010 and 2025 – “and start crafting their future products, services and marketing strategies to appeal to them, which soon will become an imperative for all brands, just as brands have focused on appealing to Gen Z in recent years,“ Lecinski says.

Today, nearly half of Roblox’s user base is younger than 13, according to the company’s data.

Roblox was one of a small handful of gaming platforms – including Fortnite and Minecraft – that became closely associated with the mainstream conception of the metaverse, starting in late 2021, following Facebook’s rebrand to Meta – and the surge of marketing hype that ensued. That hype has largely faded, but Roblox has endured – a fact that clearly isn’t lost on WPP.

“While the excitement around the metaverse and the opportunities it represents for marketers has receded somewhat over the last couple of years, Roblox is one of the metaverse platforms that is still growing at a healthy pace,” says Puneet Manchanda, professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

By teaming up with Roblox, WPP is taking a definitive stance – and perhaps positioning itself as a leader among brand and agency marketers who may have reservations about the prospect of investing in the platform.

“This partnership allows WPP to set the rules for how brands can engage on Roblox, giving it a gatekeeper role or at least a seat at the table,” says Manchanda.

And the brand marketing opportunities are rife; Roblox has hosted more than 400 brand experiences, according to its website.

Like many of its holdco competitors, WPP has also set its sights on AI. In January, the company announced that it would invest nearly $317m in proprietary AI tools this year.

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