Banana Studios shares their experience bringing Canterbury Rugby to Roblox.
Roblox Developers Provide Brands Access to Scaled Audiences
As I've mentioned previously, brands don't have to build custom games from scratch to activate on Roblox. They can launch branded UGC or integrate their brand into an existing experience that has consistent traffic already.
Since covering this topic earlier this year, more and more brands have entered Roblox via integrations with existing games, including Metallica, Netflix and Dreamworks Animation's Trolls.
What's great about this approach is that brands have a clear idea of the results they'll achieve (visits, impressions, engagement time) before they even launch.
Here's what I wrote back in January and still find to be true:
"But what's most interesting about brand integrations is that brands can know in advance what they will get for their money. When you integrate into an existing game, that game already has a track record of attracting visitors. You can easily see on Roblox how much traffic that game gets, and you can then forecast what you'll get by being there. That's huge. It also makes it easier for brand employees to demonstrate to their superiors what their ROI will look like."
One Roblox development studio that has several popular games (including Ultimate Easy Obby with 244M visits) is Banana Studios.
Banana Studios recently developed the Future Chicken branded experience with Wind Sun Sky Entertainment, which you can check out here.
I've gotten to know the team at Banana Studios over the past year, and I've been super impressed by their professionalism, Roblox expertise and drive to succeed. They are highly motivated, and that goes a long way in my book.
To better understand brand activations from the perspective of a developer, I reached out to Banana to share their POV. Here's the interview:
Q&A with Banana Studios
Stephen: How did this brand integration come about?
Banana Studios: We were approached by Dubit earlier this year about joining their metaverse network and initially we did a portal with them to Fruit Loops World. They later approached us in May about working with Canterbury to promote their new Rugby boots and now here we are!
Stephen: What was the process of integrating this brand into your experience?
Banana: We were in charge of all the development aspects of the integration while Dubit handled all of the brand communications.
We initially started by figuring out the best way to integrate Canterbury into our experience without feeling jarring or harming our engagement, and ultimately settled on a 5 stage separate course branded around the Canterbury boot launch that players could compete at the beginning or end of the experience in order to win an avatar item for their character.
We contracted out modeling the integration to Cubico Studios and worked with clothing artists to create the clothing you can see on each of the brand ambassadors, we then put all of these aspects together in a few weeks to create this integration!
Stephen: What do you think the most successful part of this integration was?
Banana: We think the immersiveness and engagement of the integration was most successful. We believe that if players are having fun they are more likely to associate with that brand and what they are trying to promote, and that was one of our core goals of this integration.
Stephen: What were you surprised about when the campaign went live?
Banana: We were surprised by the amount of players that chose to participate in the integration (nearly 25% of all users chose to participate), and the amount of players that completed the 5 stage integration (nearly 50% of users who participated) as well as the total amount of time spent on the integration over the 4 week period (2.8 years!)
Stephen: What was the reaction from players to this integration?
Banana: Players were extremely happy with the integration as it added extra content onto the already existing experience and gave out a free ugc limited as a reward!
Stephen: What types of brands would you like to work with and why?
Banana: We're always open to any kind of brand, but we're more inclined to work with entertainment brands as we feel they are better able to integrate into our experiences that are focused on fun and entertainment more than anything else and are in-turn able to feel more natural and seamless.
Stephen Dypiangco is the CEO of Metaverse Marcom, a strategy and consulting firm helping entertainment and sports brands enter Roblox.
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