The final panel of the 2024 NEXT Summit—Immersive Brand Building: Decoding Gen Z and Alpha's Phydigital World—offered a future-facing perspective on the marketing possibilities enabled through gaming platforms and the metaverse.
BeautyMatter co-founder and CEO Kelly Kovack spoke to Susannah Zeffiro Beaumont, Head of Growth Verticals at SuperAwesome; Justine Higueras, Global Group Director of Beauty at Roblox; Lana Rae, influencer at Palette Media Inc.; and Maya Kosovalic, VP of Digital Innovation and E-Commerce at NYX Professional Makeup to give a fourfold (platform, creator, brand, and agency) perspective on the subject.
Higueras began by explaining the terrain of immersive gaming and creation platform Roblox. She cites a huge community of almost 80 million daily active users who spend 2.4 hours per day on the platform. “We have to look to see where our customer is. Quite frankly, this is where most of your future consumers are sitting, spending so much time with one another. They come for three main things: always to have fun, to socialize with their peers and friends, and to self-express,” she stated. This self-expression is driven by digital avatars, which Gen Z and Gen A see as almost as, if not more important than, their physical experience.
Higueras notes that on average, brands get 11 minutes of engagment time with a user. “Imagine all that storytelling you can create and bring those users into your world, into 3D immersive spaces,” she enthused. So far, Roblox has had 400 brands join the space, most notably beauty entities like NYX Professional Makeup, e.l.f. Beauty, Fenty Beauty, and Sol de Janeiro. “It's not about product in many of these cases. It's about their brand DNA. What makes them so special, so unique? Is it about empowering the community, educating the community, co-creating with the community?” she added, citing a recent example of Fenty Beauty’s co-creation of a shade of Gloss Bomb with the Roblox community, which immediately sold out upon launching. “There's just a huge appetite to engage with users and future consumers in a storytelling-forward way. Roblox allows brands to be able to do that in an authentic way,” she said.
Zeffiro Beaumont gave some crucial data to help understand the U18 audience, thanks to SuperAwesome’s extensive research across Gen Alpha. She highlighted them as hyperdigital natives, with 60% of 7 to 12 year olds and 78% of 13 to 17 year olds owning a smart phone, in addition to tablets, gaming consoles, and smart televisions.
“What that has unlocked is this ability to discover, research, and engage with brands at a much earlier age,” she explains. She pinpointed four key Gen A and Gen Z trends that beauty brands should be aware of: their digital nativeness, engagement with peer-to-peer influencers, views of themselves as trendsetters (highlighted by new words and phrases from the Gen A entering the wider cultural lexicon), and tremendous spending power. She stated that 46% of Gen A have a debit card and are spending digitally on e-commerce. By 2025, their spending power will pass over $5 billion. “As they continue to age and set trends, they're really important to pay attention to because they are also so inherently linked with gaming,” she remarked, adding that 90% of Gen A identify as gamers and are growing up with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, which also serve as a form of social media. The blurring of virtual and physical in their lives means this young audience is expecting virtual experiences from shopping to dressing their avatar.
Rae, who has over 1.7 million followers on Roblox, gave firsthand insight into what makes users of the platform tick, pointing to the popularity of free branded user-generated content (UGC) items but also the vast possibilities of avatar expressions and gaming available.
Kosovalic described the marketing toolbox required to participate in the gaming space. “We over-index in Gen Z. We try to make sure that we are delivering on our promise on providing tools for unstoppable self- expression both in the physical and digital spaces. Whether that is in gaming worlds like Roblox or leveraging augmented reality with Beauty Bestie on Snapchat or whatever you might imagine, we want to be there and be the brand that helps them do that in an accessible way. Yes, you want to sell product, but brand awareness and affinity building is extremely important,” she proclaimed. Given the longer engagement times on Roblox, the brand awareness and affinity lift is much stronger. When it came to figuring out how they want to enter the space, building into the platform’s experience was paramount, with the NYX Professional Makeup team working hand in hand with developers to build its first Roblox Halloween experience, creating sticky game loops to increase interaction.
The conversation then shifted to tapping into creators to help build credibility on the platform, and how to do so with a minimal budget. Zeffiro Beaumont emphasized the deep community connection that gaming influencer creators have, originating from Twitch and World of Warcraft. “That moment of spectating and also having that two-way connection with creators, it's very different than other social media formats where you're responding to a 'like' or 'comment.' When we're working with brands, we're agnostic to all creators. It's very prescriptive based on the objective and initiative. These format types are more gamey, skit-based, a little bit more of humor. The content itself is much more fun, engaging, and also merging with some really cool visual effects,” she said. Rae added that “when a brand comes to a creator, the creator needs to have their own creative direction. It comes off more authentic and the players will want to go engage in that game and will actually watch the full video.”
Kosovalic advised brand founders to immerse themselves in their community and letting them guide their strategies in these spaces be it the type of experience or which creators to reach out to to co-develop an experience. Her team spent four months playing games on the platform and developed free UGC items that ended up being a driving factor to the experience. Hiring an agency is not a necessity to play on the platform as a brand.
The discussion ended on the watershed moment of e.l.f. Beauty’s activation in the summer, which saw the brand sell a handful of real-world products in-game with a Walmart-powered virtual kiosk and the implications of this for the future of commerce capabilities on Roblox. Higueras stated that the number one request from the platform’s users is more digital opportunities through brands to twin with their avatar.
“Shopping is so native on the platform. UGC items are just virtual items that your avatar wears. That marketplace on Roblox is worth $3.5 billion. This test helped us dip our toes in the water and ask, what does physical shopping look like? Our three partners—Walmart, Warner Brothers and e.l.f. Beauty—were essential in helping us decide what's next on the roadmap. We recently announced that the next big e-commerce partner we’ll work with is Shopify,” she said. “That's really to enable our creator community to sell their product. Stay tuned because early next year we'll be announcing more e-commerce solutions that brands can leverage to do the same.”
Key Takeaways
