Inside Home Depot’s First Activation on Roblox

Figuring out how to show up on a new media channel and speaking authentically to that platform’s audience can feel like a tricky puzzle for most brands. But when The Home Depot entered Roblox in March, cracking that nut was not the first major priority.

Instead, the brand was seeking how to best create a campaign around the 25^th anniversary of Kids Workshops, a monthly program Home Depot offers where kids can go to stores and work on mini-home improvement projects for free. Roblox, which has 66.1 million average daily active users per its recent earnings, made sense as the best place to execute, despite the retailer having never been there before.

“It was less like, ‘Hey, let’s let The Home Depot figure out where we can be in Roblox.’ I think it was more okay. We’ve got the workshop component. We got Roblox out here … let’s give it a try,” said Marshall Weiss, director of brand development and marketing at The Home Depot.

Brands want to try platforms to reach new audiences, especially as cookie deprecation makes tracking people across the internet more challenging. But they often worry about how to weigh the investment in doing so, especially for a platform like Roblox. Home Depot provides a blueprint of how to tackle this problem.

Roblox is a platform for young people to play, not unlike Home Depot’s Kid Workshops, creating a logical fit for the activation, which was designed by creative agency BBDO and Gen Z-focused agency IF7.

The Home Depot gave the green light on an activation inside Redcliff City, already a popular Roblox game offering a virtual version of the real world. A Home Depot made sense in the world, which already offers a mall and a beauty studio, though no other brands are present there, according to IF7’s CEO Harley Block. When people enter the Home Depot store, they can complete three different workshop activities; building a swing set, a camping tent or a pool.

So far, Home Depot’s campaign-first, media-second approach is resonating. Over 7 million users have entered The Home Depot on Roblox since its debut in March, including 1 million in the first week. Further, 1.4 million projects have been started within the game, and 85% have been completed, meaning most people who start the Home Depot’s experience were immersed enough to finish the games.

The number of visitors are in line with other brand activations on the platform — Walmart Land drew 3.3 million visitors within its first two weeks, Adweek previously reported. Still, other activations have performed exceptionally well — after more than a year on Roblox, Alo Yoga’s space surpassed 80 million visits, a Roblox told Fortune in late June.

“[Home Depot] had a real opportunity to have a gaming experience, which is rare,” said James Drake, EVP and head of brand partnerships at IF7. “It would make perfect sense to have a Home Depot [in Redcliff City] and once you enter and participate in their store in-game, it’s truly immersive.”

The company experimented with a new channel that felt native for very little cost. Home Depot only had to pay its agency partners and has not spent much on paid promotion of the activation. Roblox only started offering paid advertising opportunities last year. Earlier this year, Roblox said it will no longer allow advertisements aimed at children under 13 as part of a set of standards.

On the back of this success, Home Depot will be working to design new games for summer and Halloween in partnership with IF7 and BBDO.

“We saw the initial results, and probably within the first month, we recognized that there’s there is engagement here. This is real,” Weiss said. “We weren’t looking for a straight ROAS number on it. We were looking more for a test and learn. … What can we gauge from it without a significant investment?”

A previous version of this articles stated that Home Depot’s Roblox activation had 4.5 million visitors.