#4 Power Lunch: The Immersive Commerce Opportunity for Brands

[upbeat music] Today we're gonna talk about the Metaverse. We're gonna talk about this with two trailblazers, with Matt and Jean-Charles from Dubit.

Welcome to the show, Matt and Charles. Hey, thanks for having us. Thank you very much, Marc. How are you?

Doing well, thanks, and excited to have you here today to talk all about, you know, what big brands are doing in the Meta- Metaverse, what they're doing in gaming. You're from Dubit.

Dubit has a very long history, actually, in virtual worlds, in gaming. You started in 1999, so that's even before some of us joined the internet. Can you give us a brief introduction for, uh, both of you? Who are you?

What are your backgrounds, and what brought you to Dubit? So I'll, I'll kick off. So I'm, I'm the CEO, and I was one of, one of the people that was originally there back in 1999, right?

And, and, uh, it- it's kind of funny you mention virtual worlds first, first of all 'cause it feels a little bit like what we w- what we imagined all those years ago building virtual worlds in Flash at the time, 'cause that was the technology in dial-up internet days, is now actually possible.

Like, now it's meaningful and real and big. So of course, it's very, very exciting that that vision from 20 years ago has become reality today. Yeah, and w- what, what does it mean when you talk about virtual worlds?

How did you get started with, with that in 1999? So we, we made what I think was the very first, uh, we would call it kind of browser-based virtual worlds.

So you had th- you had 3D characters, but it wasn't a true 3D engine. It was kind of, um, think of it like as a nice sort of, uh, uh, uh, like two and a half D is the best way to describe it.

But you had avatars, we had rooms, you could explore, you could chat, you could play games. A lot of the things you would associate with Roblox today, but of course it was a proprietary closed platform.

We did, however, have brands even all the way back then coming into these experiences. We did some stuff with, uh, like Red Bull had a skate park inside of our, our world.

Uh, we even had some work amazingly with, with, with Adidas, who are now a customer of ours again 20 years on. But the idea was basically players can

chat, play games, hang out, social experience, much like you imagine with Roblox, but we couldn't do it with a full 3D engine. And Je- Jean-Charles, what is your background? How did you get into, you know- Oh, uh-...

virtual worlds, brands? Well, my background is pretty boring, so I'm gonna explain everything in detail. So I, my first business was, uh, real estate, and for some reason, I met Matthew in 2000...

Was it '20 or '21? Twenty- '21. Early '21. Yeah. Maybe. [laughs] Yeah. I don't remember. And Matthew told me, "Do you know Roblox?" I said, "No, never heard of Roblox." "But you're a gamer, you should know Roblox."

Said, "Okay, I'll have a look." And he told me, well, that's a platform with, at that time, was it something like 100 million monthly active users? Probably in that region. And I said, "Well,

how is it possible I don't know a platform with 100 million active users monthly?" And I realized how big Roblox was already and how fast it was growing.

And my very first question to Matt, I remember, was, "Is it allow- Are we allowed to advertise in Roblox?" He said, "Yeah." "Is there some advertising in Roblox?" "No." I say, "What? How is this possible?"

And this is probably where we started to work together and, uh, joint venture and develop on Roblox and made Dubit, uh, 10 times bigger in a few years. So your, your background is originally gaming? No, it's real estate.

No, I told you it was boring. Yeah. Okay. So you, you, you came together, you, you started collaborating on Dubit. Could you tell us a little bit more, what is Dubit? How does that work?

How do people have to think about your company? Sure. We work with a bunch of different brands, so Adidas, Unilever, H&M, NASCAR, like a whole... Starbucks. A huge variety of brands that ultimately want to

figure out how do they, how do they reach, how do they engage, and how do they get ROI from these, these huge numbers of people who are playing games?

And of course, I think, I think there's a bit of a misconception around gaming still, or, or less so now, but there used to be that gaming was this kind of only console gaming, for example. That's what a gamer was.

The reality is today, like the average gamer is 35 years old. Billions of people play games.

Games have come to mean a lot more than just console games, and I think Roblox is a great example of this, where people are kinda hanging out. It's social, it's gaming, it's stuff to do, it's fun with friends, right?

That's the way we think of these platforms. And so what we help brands do is figure out, look, how do we, how do we enter that platform and similar platforms authentically?

And I, I, I like to think, you know, we're past the phase of we got 100 million visits as being like the measure of success, as opposed to actually figuring out, okay, now how can we help brands at least achieve ROO or ideally ROI from those campaigns?

Yeah, and how is that conversation that you have with brands today different than it was 20 years ago? Well, [laughs] even just like five years ago.

So when we started working in Roblox around sort of 2019, pre-COVID, right? And, and it's kind of interesting. The reason we started working in there relates back to the way brands spoke to us about the platform.

And so the example I'll give you is we've got a research team. We survey like tens of thousands of young people in the US, Europe, parts of Asia every year. And have done for the last 10 years.

Some of the biggest, like, tech companies, they all buy this data to understand what are the consumer trends.

So my research team said to me in 2019, "There's this platform, this thing called Roblox, where certain, certain groups of young people in America are playing this, or 50% of them are playing it every week."

And I think it was probably at the time around nine to sort of 12-year-olds.

Now, it wasn't as expansive as it is now, but the point is, once you get above 50%, there's actually very few games, platforms, apps that, that have 50% of a, of a cohort playing every week.

So we said, "Well, this is fa- this is fascinating." Some of the brands that we're already working with should look to build in this platform. And again, this is, this is pre-COVID outbreak, which is important.

So I went to a bunch of brands, entertainment brands, other types of brands that we, that we already knew and said, "Look, check this thing out. It's massive. Your consumers are there."

And a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot said to me, "Look, Matthew, it l- it looks terrible. Like, it, it's terrible. The quality's terrible. It's for kids. We are not interested in this."

And this kind of, like, reminded me almost identically of what they used to say to me about YouTube, like 10-plus years before.

'Cause we-- Again, 'cause of the research business, we saw how much time young people were spending on YouTube, and if you remember, like 10-odd years ago, YouTube was like Annoying Orange, Charlie Bit My Finger.

And yeah, the graphic quality was, you know, the video quality was poor, but technology improves. And so it was that kind of seeing history repeat itself where they didn't get the platform.

They didn't realize that it's effectively the third wave of user-created content, user-created 3D, where YouTube was user-created video and of course Twitter and everything was y- text before that.

The fact people didn't get it made me think, "We've got to be in it."

Because by being in there early, we're gonna learn how this works, and we're gonna be far more valuable to brands now because we spent so long figuring this out.

'Cause we were confident that this thing would keep growing. This, this is a inevitability, in my opinion, that we see more and more user-created 3D experiences. So y- you're, you're saying the fact that

brands didn't get the platform and the, and kind of the, the thought that this is an evolution from user-created 2D content to users-created 3D content made it interesting? Jean-Charles. Or, yeah.

Just in the sense that that's exactly what happened with YouTube for us.

So we were trying to get brands to participate in YouTube 10-plus years ago, and the ear- and, and early on, they didn't get it 'cause they didn't understand the creator flywheel. So more creators means more content.

More content attracts more consumers. More consumers obviously attract more money, and more money attract more creators. And so it was pretty obvious that that's the flywheel Roblox had.

That was the same flywheel that YouTube and other UGC video platforms had.

And if you take a bet on technology that technology just keeps improving, you can bet that Roblox will get more powerful, which will make things easier, visually better, attract more consumers, attract more creators, and that flywheel will keep spinning.

And so it was seeing and hearing those same words that we heard 10 years before about the, the, the one of the most disruptive waves of, of entertainment technology ever.

You look at it again and go, "This is gonna happen with Roblox. This is inevitable. We've gotta be there." Yeah. Yeah.

So Jean-Charles, you mentioned before you came together in around 2021, and for you, it was interesting that there was no advertising on the platform. Nevertheless, there are millions of users. There's ad space.

No one is using it. Was this of the what made it so interesting for you, or what was the thing that made it click for you? Totally advertising it. It was, for me, like, it was a huge public place.

What I, what I really like is when Matthew compares Roblox with, for example, a tennis club. Like, you can have friends at your tennis club. You can have different friends at school.

And why wouldn't you have different friends in Roblox? You can meet up in real life or not, whatever it is. So it's a public space.

We've seen a lot of Web3 platforms launching with virtual worlds with a few traffic, unfortunately. So I was like, "It's crazy that this platform with such a huge growth and millions of users, no advertising."

So this is where we, I think we clicked with Matthew and decided to put all in on this platform and on this new business model. And I totally agree with Matt. Like,

it's not just about coming from 2D and putting stuff in 3D. It's, it's, because it's a social network, it's really some new ways of interacting, new ways of reaching users, customers.

Yeah, it's redefining some marketing all over the world.

So what I'm trying to do with my other company, Influinity, is to instead of bringing data from influencers or creators themselves, we bring the data from the users.

So people say, "But how can you bring data from users?" So basically, instead of saying, what are influencers' goals? What do they want? What will they promote? What type of brand? What type of content they will do?

Well, the best way to do it is to ask the community. But today, it's impossible to ask the community. How can you ask billions of people on YouTube, viewers on YouTube, what they want to see?

Nobody's ready to do this, and this is what we are building right now.... is a loyalty program that is not based on purchases, but it's based on engagement of the viewers on YouTube.

So viewers are very engaged and very happy to answer a few questions. Any way, any interaction with their favorite YouTuber is a great moment for them. So we get these insights from these guys

directly from the users, and creators will change the content or do the content the community wants.

This will make much better brand exposures, and we therefore do the bridge between YouTube and Roblox, thanks to Matt and Dubit. So let's say- How does that bridge look like? The bridge, it's very simple.

It's like Dubit has a loyalty program, and, um, Influnity has a loyalty program. So you just make the points exchangeable at some point. But what, what's really interesting is that it will not be,

uh, I mean, it will be different forever from now because everything will be linked. These are public places. It's crazy that they're not interoperable, so we are making them interoperable.

Like, you can go from a public space to another public space with the same money or the same currency or, uh, the same avatar or whatever it is. We're just saying that a user from YouTube

is going to Roblox, is going to Minecraft, is going to e-commerce, is going to everywhere. We can track this. Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah, so how, how this looks like in, in real life is that you basically create a, a cross-platform loyalty program where users collect points that they take with them

wherever they are, whether they're on Roblox or YouTube or whatever platform or creator they interact with. So we start on YouTube.

So basically you watch your favorite shows on YouTube, and this allows you to earn some points, and then you can spend the points in the influencer's shop, and the shop will be branded with, um, a sponsor, for example.

And once the user has some points, he can spend them for his favorite interactions with his favorite YouTubers. So basically, it will be digital interactions most of the time.

So the creators, YouTubers won't have much to do. It's all automated for them. They also can, of course, offer some very customized interactions.

But the most important is, is that we bring users around creators that they love, and then we can drive them somewhere else. So you can go on Roblox, you can go and obviously on Dubit's customers.

So that-that's a- Yeah... great way to incentivize traffic. Yeah. Okay. Uh, that's super interesting. A quick shout-out to the audience, the listeners who tuned in. You can ask questions.

Just comment, uh, whether you're on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or whatever platform, YouTube, you, you're watching this, just comment and we see this, and we'll have a Q&A at the end of the show.

So Jean-Charles, that's a very interesting technology. Matt, coming back to you now. Building on Roblox, what does that mean to you if you, if you have cross-platform loyalty?

Is that something you're already applying, uh, with brands? Is that something that brands are interested in, or is this mostly confined to Roblox at this stage?

So we, we've, we've been doing a few, kind of, what I think are pretty interesting experiments around using rewards and loyalty to drive real-world sales.

And so one example that I can talk about and share the data from is from, from a campaign for Lunchables with, with Kraft and Publicis, and it's because that's been, um, the data's been published.

We won a, an award for that last week. But the cool thing is, so here's how it works. We would allow a, a consumer to scan a QR code on the physical product.

Scanning that QR code would launch the loyalty or points website. From there, clicking a link or a button would award the consumer, in this case, Lunchables loyalty points, and take them into Roblox.

From there, they can use those points to unlock or, or redeem in-game rewards. And the reason I like to talk about this is because it really worked really well.

So we saw a twenty-two percent, uh, uplift in sales velocity for the packs that had the QR code. So what that means is there was a good

kind of, not quite scientific, but look, there's a good benchmark here, packs without the QR codes, packs with. Those with the QR code sold twenty-two percent faster, right?

Which means players wanted those reward points.

And so we've been able to drive people to purchase real world product through Roblox, and I think it's very natural that as we expand out this technology further, we'll have a lot, you know, many more compelling examples of how

incentives, rewards nudge people to, to take certain behaviors and actions. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I wanna take a, a ste- step back again before we dive deeper into some, some of the activations that you did with, with Dubit.

So one of the questions I had is that you mentioned before that a lot of those brands didn't understand the platform at the beginning, and now it looks like most of the c- consumer brands are on Roblox, and most of them kind of understood that this is the platform they need to be in.

And many of those moved away from that initial hype we saw two or three years ago where everyone thought, you know, NFTs is the next big thing in customer loyalty and engagement and- Now they kind of figured out that it's, it's more difficult than expected.

Consumer engagement is not as high as expected, and ROI is difficult, and, and they're slowly moving towards gaming and platforms like Roblox. How does that pitch to consumer brands look like today?

Or what do you hear from, from those brands you're working with? What are they most interested in? What's the expectations they have for this platform? Things are, things are moving quickly. So a few years ago,

everyone was kind of just happy with, wow, we've had a million people, you know, 10 million people, whatever the number is, visit an experience.

Now, of course, the reality is, and this is, this is nothing insightful, right? But if brands hope that when they spend advertising money, they make more money back in, in revenue, right? That's the obvious goal here.

So the challenge we've had for a while with Roblox and, and a lot of gaming platforms is how do we, how do we attribute that activity back to revenue, or at least some other kind of objective?

So the great thing with, with Lunchables is that we were able to make that connection. In other cases, we can't. And so instead...

Well, in fact, another one where we did was, was for Superdrug in the UK, where we drove with a four-week campaign inside of a popular Roblox campaign, Roblox game.

15,000 people went into the physical Superdrug stores here in the UK. And again, we can measure what did they buy when they went in there, and there's a bunch of ROI we can get from that.

If we can't get that far down the pipe, sort of bottom end of the funnel, we can at least look at things like brand uplift. So another good example would be we find that when people,

and if you don't know Roblox, Roblox players love customizing their avatar. Their, their virtual identity is very, very important. So they bought something like two billion avatar clothes and accessories last year.

I think this is pretty unsurprising, but it's a great stat.

When we look at a brand lift study for consumers who have purchased a virtual item that they wear on their avatar, they report that 70% of them are now more likely to buy that brand in the real world.

And again, it shouldn't be s- that surprising because you've just spent money, literally money, like real money on buying something. You wouldn't do that if you didn't have an affinity for that brand.

But the cool thing is, because these price points are like a dollar, it makes that brand more accessible, and it starts to build brand affinity. And so my kind of overarching point here is

we've gone from measuring just impressions to starting to figure out ways to either measure brand uplift or to measure some other kind of return on objective or even ROI.

And if you, if you go a little bit deeper now into some specific activations, like you had a big announcement two weeks ago, um, or, or even last week with Starbucks, uh, that Starbucks launched four different types of, of worlds, games.

Can you expand on that a little bit? What, what did Starbucks do, and why was it interesting for Starbucks to, to get into Roblox? Yeah. So, so we, we created, and again, this, this is like s- it's so straightforward.

That's, that, that's the great thing about it. But we said, "Look, you, you guys should make a virtual immersive, however, whatever word you want to use, Starbucks stores

that we'll put inside existing popular Roblox games. And then what we're going to do is allow or enable the people who look to be the most promising customers to win

free kind of coffee, coffee upgrades, whatever it might be. There's various different offers that you can claim in the real world." And so the idea here is a few kind of key pieces to this.

The first is like, so there are lots and lots of popular Roblox games ob- obviously, but those games have very, very different demographics. A game is not a game.

In the same way that advertising on TV, there's a science behind it. There's a whole team inside of a, of a, of an agency that, that work on media planning. So think about games very similarly.

There's different player ages, demographics, countries, blah, blah, blah.

So the first thing you do is you identify which of the games that have the best overlap with players who like my brand, the right age range, the right countries. Those games become the host for these immersive stores.

Then, of course, the next thing you do is you try and say, "Now we want to incentivize people to go into our stores, and we'll do that by offering something free."

But we don't wanna give that, and it sounds, again, slightly horrible, but you can't just give that to everybody because not everybody's going to actually necessarily redeem it or become a good customer.

And so we try and again look at signals. Who are the people that actually engaged with that Starbucks store? Who spent time in there? Who came back more than once? Who completed the challenge?

Now, everybody will win something virtual, but not everybody wins that free item because we're trying to identify who we think could become good future customers of Starbucks. So again, very simple in concept.

Put virtual stores inside of popular games, and then let people win free upgrades or free coffees inside of Starbucks.

But then there's a whole bunch of kinda like sciency stuff behind it around how you actually execute that and who you give those to.

And, and just maybe also with, with other brands now, not specifically to Starbucks, how do you identify who's an interesting customer based on the data you ha- you have on, on Roblox?

So there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of signals you can look at, and it's not about looking at any one and going, "That's the reason," but there's a bunch of things.

So let's, let's use the example of like the Hindenburg report that came out last week. You know, they're saying there's lots of bots on the platform. We can look at how old is an account.

If an account has just been made or is maybe a few days old, it's not the best sign, right? We're looking for someone who's been around for a while. We can look at other signals, and again-

We don't use this exclusively, but we can say, well, if someone's taken time to customize their avatar and got a bunch of different clothing on there, or even a bunch of paid clothing on there, or even an inventory with a lot of paid clothing, that could be a signal that they have disposable income versus someone who's not bothered.

We can look at what they do inside of that activation. So how, what... Do they just come in, try and win the free item, or do they actually spend time? Do they look at the other things in the store?

Do they do other things in there? And so there's a whole bunch of kind of different behavioral signals that sort of at least give a sense for, hey, this person's come back a few times.

They've actually looked at other parts of the, the brand activation. They've not just come in to try and win the free item. Their avatar account looks good. They've got inventory that's been bought, blah, blah, blah.

You stack all of these together, and you start to get a score, is the way we look at it, of who's more likely to become a customer.

Now, again, really, really important, when, when people can win a prize, there'll always be a virtual prize they can win, but we just can't necessarily give out several dollars of real world prize to everybody.

And so of course, we try to make sure it's going to the right people. What, what's some of the feedback you now got since Starbucks launched this? Are people excited about it? Are they, like, keep playing it?

Uh, or is it kind of a one-off engagement campaign? I can't, I, I can't reveal any numbers, but, but, but what I can say is the, the,

the best comp here is what we did with Superdrug, where Superdrug activated in a game for four weeks, and they gave away some free physical items that players could redeem from the real world stores.

15,000 people actually went to the stores to get those, and I, I try and contextualize it as that number doesn't sound big in like the Roblox world, but it's like Wimbledon Center Court being full, right?

It's still a lot of people going into stores on the back of a four-week campaign. Starbucks' campaign is longer, it's in more games, and there's more prizes.

It's going well, and it's gonna be big, and I'm looking forward to at least talk about those numbers, but right now, while the campaign's running, we, we, we can't. Yeah.

Um, something I wanted to talk with you as well is digital assets,

and we touched upon interoperability of loyalty programs and, like, taking loyalty points from YouTube to Roblox to Fortnite or wherever platform you go, um, and a lot of people in the Web3 space are proclaiming that digital assets and collectibles could be a solution for this once all those platforms start looking at, at that.

There are some integrations now with Roblox, I think through Flaunt Loyalty, which is a, a US startup that integrated some kind of collectible campaign with the Paris Hilton activation that then takes users outside of Roblox and unlocks some collectibles which are ba- or on, on the blockchain.

What do you think about all that? Do you think that's relevant for user engagement, interoperability of loyalty, or isn't that a topic at all for you? I, I think, I think there's a few parts here. So in a,

in a perfect world, it would obviously be nice if I buy something in one experience that I can wear, or one platform like Roblox, I can take that with me.

The reality is I think we're a long way from interoperable, um, assets, if only because there's not a lot of incentive for the leading platforms to, to allow that. Why would they open up?

And I, if I were in their shoes, I, I wouldn't either. And so I, I think it would be better for the players, but I think we're hard to get there.

However, there's other types of then interoperability around loyalty, rewarding behavior, and so on, and I think those things can very comfortably exist both across what people do in

gaming worlds, in YouTube, in real world stores.

I think we're inevitably gonna see a convergence of loyalty and rewards for customers across all the different touch points, and I think that is valuable because customers,

so like from our experience with Lunchables, they liked it, they enjoyed it, and it drives results for brands. So again, avatar assets, ah, it's hard. But consumer touch points, loyalty, absolutely.

Do you share this perspective, Jean-Charles? I mean, Matt is the, the pope for this, so. Yeah. Yeah. It's the first time I've been called that. [laughs] The, the pope of the metaverse, uh, Matt. Yeah. [laughs] Um.

[laughs] Exactly. Yeah. I mean, why, why would I say something different? Yeah, yeah.

Another topic I, I wanna, like, talk with you about is advertising, and Jean-Charles, you mentioned this at the very beginning, uh, when you introduced yourself that you saw a, a big opportunity with brands not advertising on the platform.

We now see some games popping up on Roblox where advertising is neatly integrated into the gaming experience itself, uh, kind of n- in a non-obstru- obstructive way. How do you see advertising on Roblox?

What's the big opportunity there for brands? Well, in, in my opinion, let's, let's have a look at this from a user point of view. When you're a Roblox player, uh, you love branded experiences. Why do you love them?

Because it's a new experience. It's kind of a pop-up experience. It brings you maybe new free UGC, new items, new worlds, new places to experiment, to share with your friends.

So it's, it's pretty much like, I don't know, there's a new mall popping in your, uh, in your district, in your neighborhood, and you feel, "Well, it's quite a cool place. Okay, it's branded. There are shops in it.

There are something... stuff to buy." But I mean, that's pretty much real life, and you're super happy to hang out there. And get there. So users on Roblox don't feel...

I mean, the way Dubit does it, the users, they do not feel at all that we just put brands in front of them.

They're really happy to have new experiences sponsored by brands and new stuff that are available thanks to the brands. So how, how you understand advertising is kind of experiencing a branded experience.

However, like there are also like some, some games now that have like native advertising. You would be in a game, and then they have space where they have an ad within the game.

How- And so- How do you think about that, yeah? Yeah, so, so we were one of the, uh, I think seven, uh, uh, first partners with Roblox to be able to offer those ad units to our customers.

So we were, we were part of the rollout of that program and obviously helped to inform a lot of how it, how it works today. The way, the way I think about that is it's a fantastic...

There's two things that are, that are great about it. First of all, it's a very easy entry point to just try out the platform. And of course, you know, Roblox,

it has come a long way in, uh, sort of general understanding. But, like it's still new. It's a new thing.

And, and in a world where you could spend money on Facebook or social media or whatever it might be, and know that you're, you know, you're not gonna get fired by your boss, it's great to have

an easy, low-risk way of, of entering something like Roblox. So that's how I think about the billboards piece.

You've also then got in there, which we use all the time, the portals where we can promote a brand experience and teleport them into that, that branded experience.

And so kind of the way, the way you want to think about advertising on Roblox is this spectrum from ad units that you can buy, which we, we call those immersive ads, and there's a few other things in there around search ads and various bits that are being rolled out by Roblox.

Then you've got the level up, which is a brand can go into an existing popular game, and then you've got... you can build your own game.

And it's that kind of, sort of spectrum of both, both investment and, um, you know, potential return as well. All right. So we're already almost at the end of the show.

We'll ha- have a short lightning round with very juicy questions at the end. For the listeners, if you have questions, please, uh, write them in the chat and we'll see them. We have a short Q&A now.

I have the first question actually for you, which is, what are, what is some of the most actionable advice or takeaway you would give a brand leader considering building in, on Roblox today? The simplest is

you need to decide, are you in the games business? And by that, I mean most brands should not be trying to build their own standalone experience because it's a big commitment.

You've got to keep updating it, keep the content fresh. That doesn't mean don't be in Roblox. It just means, like you wouldn't create your own TV show, you'd advertise next to a popular show.

That's how I think most brands should think about this. First question they ask, "Are we in the games business, or are we in the fashion business, or are we in the whatever business?" Yeah.

That's a, that's a very good analogy.

And maybe a follow-up question on that is, how would you think or what advice would you give a luxury brand that might be a little bit more reserved and cautious about their brand image and how it's portrayed and how, you know, users and customers interact with it?

Is Roblox a platform for luxury brands? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look, Roblox, as, as I mentioned when we, when we started, like people said, "Oh, Roblox is, it's, it's terrible. The quality's bad," blah, blah, blah.

It doesn't have to be. It might be if, if, you know, some of the games are not great, but that's fine. You can make really nice experiences, first of all.

The other key thing for a luxury brand to think about, in, in my opinion, is luxury perfumes. Perfumes expanded the accessibility of your brand at a lower price point.

People could go through the airport, "Yeah, I'm in a good mood. I'm going on holiday. I'm gonna try out the perfume." Right? "Oh, and I'll buy it because it's cheap."

And now you've bought into Tom Ford or whatever it might be. Think of Roblox in that same way.

It's a, it's a lower entry point to start buying in and building a relationship with your brand that will grow them into a fan and a customer over time. I might, I might be a, a l- a little more harsh on this.

I mean, most of luxury brands think their image is, is so, so polished that going into Roblox is maybe a, a threat or a risk. But the risk right now is to not go on...

The risk right now is to not go on TikTok, is to not go on YouTube. Like, kids just want... I mean, kids are just like everybody. When I say kids, sorry, it's 20 plus or whatever. They're just like anybody.

They buy what they see. I mean, I'm in California right now. I almost want to buy a Tesla. Almost. I will not. But I mean, you never buy what you don't see.

You only buy what you see, and what they see today is what is YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. So why would you not be there? Why would you not be where the traffic is? Why-- I mean, it's crazy.

It's, it's like saying, "No, I don't wanna be in this street because this street look, I don't know, it's not the right image for my brand." Yeah, but look at the street. It's full of people.

Yeah, that's a, that's a very good, uh, analogy as well and, and connects to what Matt said before. Most of the brands come here because they can build brand affinity.

They can connect to, uh, just a large audience of, of next gen consumers, and that's where consumers are. So, uh, very, very interesting. Uh, we have a question from Fabrice Raiofera. Um, I'll quickly show it here.

Do we know how much brands have spent so far on Roblox? No idea. It's gonna be,

uh, let's say, it's gonna be north-- It's gonna be under a hundred million, I, I would assume, and it's gonna be north of fifty is my guess, but I could be wrong. It's just a guess. Yeah.

Um, I have another question here as questions are coming in. We recently, and you touched upon this, Matt, we recently saw that report that came out that alleged Roblox of inflating user numbers.

What do you think about this report? Is there anything to it? How should brands think about those allegations? I think the most important point here is that we, we are seeing continued revenue growth across Roblox,

which if it was all growth being driven by bots, that would not be the case. So revenue wouldn't be growing.

There's no question, and Roblox have never denied, that when they report, for example, uh, seventy million DAU or daily active users, that is like daily active accounts. That's accounts that have logged in.

A lot of other platforms report in the same way 'cause it can be difficult to dedup the different user accounts a player might have. So I think that's more of a mis-- at least... However, my sympathy here is

when we hear DAU, daily active user, you do kind of think of the person rather than daily active account. So I get that, and that's a fair criticism.

And then, look, the child, the child safety piece I find pretty frustrating because obviously the ideal is that no child is ever exposed to any, any inappropriate experience and, and, and so on.

However, if you compare the number of reports for Roblox versus other platforms, even relative to their size, it's way, way down. And that's because Roblox does moderate a lot.

But also, Roblox isn't fundamentally about chatting. Right? It's about playing. So the majority of like, there just isn't as much opportunity

for content to be, you know, inappropriate content to be created 'cause that's not the purpose of the platform. So to me, look, it's absolutely brand safe.

The fact that the revenue's growing shows you that users are growing. Yes, it would be lovely if we could have deduped MAUs and DAUs,

but I think it's directionally the point here is it's growing, it will keep growing because of that creator flywheel. More creators, more content. Content, consumers. Consumerism means money. Money means creators.

It will keep growing. So it's kind of don't stress too much in the short term. There are real people there spending huge amounts of time, and it's not like a cesspit for, you know, bad things. Yeah. It just isn't.

I've never encountered that on the platform, ever. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's very helpful. Um, we have another question here from Maya Wucinovich. I'll quickly show it. What's the next competitor to Roblox?

Is there one? Yeah, look, it's the obvious ones you'd throw in there, uh, because they're doing a lot to build out UEFN. Uh, big part-partnership with Lego and Disney. You've got Zepeto as another potential platform.

And I think this is my slightly contrarian view, that I think we'll see a lot more coming from Meta in the coming months to years. And my, my suspicion, there is no inside knowledge here, but I think Meta

has the cash obviously to throw at something like this. They've already solved the advertising piece, which means they have to now figure out, "How do I get people creating inside of my Horizons World?"

That's already, by the way, people don't realize you can play Horizon Worlds in the web browser. Does not require a VR headset. So when I talk about Meta, I'm absolutely not meaning on the back of VR.

I'm suggesting that they won't want Roblox and others to run away with, let's call it the immersive social opportunity, and that's what's happening today. Whether Fortnite can catch up is tough.

They've got to build their developer tools. So right now, I think Roblox is sufficiently far ahead that they probably won't get caught.

But I think, I think Meta just might surprise us by just how much money's being thrown right at solving these problems.

So should, should brands still, um, consider Roblox as their go-to platform for immersive social experiences, or should they already be looking at competitors like, uh, Zepeto or even Fortnite- Yeah.

No, no- Maybe even Meta. Yeah, look, I'm, I'm of the view that when you, when you look at the overlap, right, between these audiences, there's actually surprisingly...

Like, it's not like all Roblox users are Fortnite users and all Fortnite users are Roblox users. It's different people. So again, if you want to reach people who are like Gen Z, whatever, alpha, they play games,

you should be looking at those different platforms. It's not one or nothing right now. But obviously today, Roblox, in, in my opinion, has one of the mo-more built out ecosystems for brands. Better developer tools.

It's easier for me to promote those brand experiences that others will catch up, but brands should still be looking at them. And, and we do stuff in all three of them. Yeah. All right.

Hey, we're already at the end of the show. I wanna do a short lightning round to, uh, to finish this. It was extremely interesting to talk with both of you. I think we just scratched the surface here.

There could be much more that we could talk about when it comes to Roblox and virtual brand experiences. So lightning round is a short set of questions with short answers, and I wanna start it right off.

What's your favorite platform in the metaverse right now? Roblox. Yeah, Roblox, right? What's the biggest myth about the metaverse or virtual experiences you'd like to debunk? It's not just kids.

People still think Roblox is just kids. It's not. There's, there's something like, I don't know, forty-five percent... I, I forget the numbers. I'll, I'll get it wrong.

There's over a hundred million over eighteens on the platform. It's not only brand exposure, it's ROI for brands in real life, ROI on sales. What's a common mistake brands make when entering the metaverse?

I would say, again, assuming that they need to build their own experience, like we talked about before. Most brands are not in the games business.

My point of view is when they go to competitors, that's the biggest mistake they do. Right. 'Cause most of the competitors would just build a game for them. We drive traffic and ROI. Yeah.

If you could bring one real world experience into the virtual world, what would it be? For me, right, I, I can't wait for when live sports rights are gonna be possible to be inside of these experiences.

It will be amazing. Watching live soccer with a million other people I just think will be incredible. And you, Jean-Georges? I struggle to pick one. There are so many. Um, yeah, I mean, I mean,

and none's, none's, not a specific one, but the more interoperability and the more virtual to in real life connections we have, the cooler it will be. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's already the end of the show.

Uh, Matt and Jean-Georges from DOOBIT, thanks a lot for joining. Uh, this was super interesting. And everyone who tuned in, uh, on the live stream, thanks for joining. The conversation continues in the comments.

Feel free to comment and comment on others' comments. Let's keep the discussion flowing. Uh, thanks for your support. Please like and subscribe. It keeps the show going.

If you wanna check out more about DOOBIT, here's a QR code on the top left of the screen at doobit.io. You can check out what they do, their latest Starbucks activation, and everything else they do with big brands.

Guys, thanks for joining, and all the best, and talk soon. [upbeat music] Thank you so much, Marc. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. [upbeat music]