Advertising to children is strictly regulated – but household brands are flooding the gaming platform Roblox with interactive marketing. Is this a danger to young users?
, players don the uniform of the Tex-Mex restaurant chain to make burritos for virtual customers. The available toppings are taken from Chipotle’s real-world menu. Your shirt and cap are emblazoned with the Chipotle logo. And when the game launched two years ago, the first 100,000 players could earn “Burrito Bucks” to exchange for a prize onsimply hands you a skateboard with which to bust a few kickflips across a park plastered with the shoe manufacturer’s logo.
“Roblox’s popularity among younger demographics opens up new avenues for reaching and engaging with the next generation of consumers in a space where they are already active and invested,” says Robert Jan van Dormael, vice-president of marketing consumer audio at the Samsung subsidiary Harman. “Exposure to unhealthy food marketing in traditional advergames is associated with greater preferences for, and more positive attitudes towards, marketed unhealthy foods and brands, and also greater subsequent consumption of these foods,” says Evans.
But what some have seen as an effective new realm of advertising, others consider a potential danger to vulnerable consumers. In April 2022, the American advertising watchdog Truth in Advertising with US and UK advertising regulators claiming Roblox allowed advertising to be surreptitiously interlaced with organic content, and that the tens of millions of children who played Roblox every day were being immersed in adverts without their knowing.
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