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Hi Marketing Bestie, Oh no. It’s almost the Sephora sale. Now I know why Ari is being so nice to me. We’re a Rouge family (unfortunately). Good luck to all. Also, quick note: speaking of budgets you can’t defend, you hit the numbers and leadership never saw how. In Q4, work they can’t see is budget they won’t approve. Join me Tuesday to close the 4 invisible gaps hiding your impact, before 2027 plans get locked. I might even drop my skincare routine. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by SiriusXM Media 🎧 PSA: If you don't know where to start on audio, this is your primer. SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD 5 Rules for Marketing Where Your Audience Actually Spends TimeStephanie Latham spent years at Meta helping shape what social media meant for advertisers. Now she’s VP of Global Brand Partnerships and Advertising at Roblox, where she gets to build all over again. Her read on every new channel is the same. Time spent moves first. Budget shows up late. She watched it happen with social. She watched it happen with mobile. Now she’s watching it with Roblox, which she says has over 120 million daily users and logged 29 billion hours last quarter. Her playbook works on any channel your audience is drifting toward. Find the hours. Be worth them. Move before the plan catches up. Listen to the full episode here where Stephanie breaks down the three ways to show up on Roblox, how Fenty Beauty invited players to help develop a lip gloss, and why she’d rather try and fail than repeat last year’s plan. 1️⃣. Budget Trails Behavior. Find The Hours Your Plan Doesn’t Cover.Stephanie’s Take: “Consumer behavior doesn’t lie. Think about the early days of social media, the early days of mobile. It generally takes marketers too long for the money to match where the time is spent.” She’s watched this lag play out more than once. Attention moves first. Budget follows once the shift is hard to ignore. Her math on the other side is simple. Time is a fixed supply. Hours someone spends on Roblox are hours they didn’t spend somewhere else. Her team runs incrementality tests with advertisers to show who a media plan is missing. The same test works on any channel you’re weighing. Takeaway: Pull time spent data for your audience from platform reports, surveys, or a panel. Line it up next to your budget by channel and find the biggest gap between share of hours and share of dollars. Ask that platform for unique reach, then confirm it with your own incrementality test before you move real money. 2️⃣. Reach Gets You The Impression. Measure What Happens After It.Stephanie’s Take: “I always say reach still matters. But what happens after that impression matters even more. The advertisers I see being most successful on our platform, and driving the best results, are the ones who take the time to slow down and listen to the community. Something that may seem obvious to you or me is actually not authentic to this community.” Stephanie says Roblox users spend almost 3 hours a day on the platform, with 10 to 11 minutes of that with a brand. Her comparison is a phone scroll, where a brand might get one or two seconds. She’s upfront that measurement is still catching up in newer spaces, where standard definitions don’t exist yet. Her team works with major third-party measurement companies on brand lift, recall, engagement, and time spent. Takeaway: Before a test goes live, write down the 1 post-impression metric that decides whether it worked. Time spent, brand lift, recall, and engagement are the four Stephanie’s team tracks. Ask the platform which third-party measurement partners it works with, set the number you’d call a win, and put the review on the calendar at 30 days. 3️⃣. Spend Time In The Channel Before You Brief It.Stephanie’s Take: “What I love to do with partners is first get them set up and create their avatar. That’s the central part of their identity on Roblox. And then play. You’ve got to get into some of the top games and see how people are communicating and chatting, what they’re wearing, what they’re doing. It starts to make something really abstract way more tangible. When you bring marketers into this space, you start to see them light up with what they know best, their brands and their stories.” Stephanie compares Roblox today to the early days of social, when marketers learned about new platforms through their kids, neighbors, and nieces and nephews. Her fix is to put the team inside before anyone writes a brief. She points to e.l.f. Beauty as a brand that did this well. They followed where the time was being spent, figured out how it was being spent, then found ways to add value to what was already happening. They built an experience, run ads, and work with user-generated content. Fenty Beauty took it a step further. They built an experience to teach the community about the ingredients in their makeup, then invited players to help develop the next Gloss Bomb. Stephanie says they listened, made the product, and sold it out of Sephora. Takeaway: Block 2 hours for the team inside the channel before the brief gets written. Create an account and use it the way your audience does. Write down 5 things you notice about how people talk, dress, and behave there, and open the brief with that list. If the channel is hard to use directly, sit next to someone in your audience and watch. 4️⃣. Start With What You Already Have. Move Up When The Test Says So.Stephanie’s Take: “Am I comfortable just running assets I have for another platform? The short answer is that works really well, and we’re seeing lots of brands have success there. But because it’s such a creative canvas, your brain goes really big about what’s possible. The challenge is often figuring out where to start, and we can actually learn a lot from something very basic like running rewarded video.” When Stephanie joined Roblox about 3 years ago, the only offer for brands was building a game. She calls that ahead of its time, because maintaining a live game takes infrastructure and a dedicated team. So the team built easier ways in. There are 3 today. Standard ad units and video, which can reuse creative you already run elsewhere. Integrations inside top games through Brand Link, Roblox’s vetted partner program. And a fully built brand experience, which takes the most upfront and ongoing work. Takeaway: Pick the lowest-friction format in the new channel and run creative you already have. Write 1 question the test has to answer, like whether it reaches people you can’t reach elsewhere. Run it for a few weeks. Move to a partnership or a custom build only after the basic test shows you something worth building on. 5️⃣. Build The Speed Before The Moment Shows Up.Stephanie’s Take: “Gen Z doesn’t consume culture, they participate in it. The brands that have the best success are the ones willing to trust and move really quickly. This all happens in real time, so when you get bogged down by the planning process and the approvals process, you can miss the moment. What’s hot right now won’t be hot in six months, and that’s hard for a lot of brands’ planning cycles.” Stephanie points to what happened on Roblox this past year. Grow a Garden, which she describes as FarmVille in immersive 3D, rolled out new updates every Saturday morning that turned into events. The game broke records for concurrent players, and brands jumped in, including Travis Kelce. Steal a Brainrot became the next breakout hit. Bruno Mars decided to launch his new song there with a concert, which she says set a Guinness record for a single-artist virtual concert. Her advice on trust is to start small. Skip your marquee property for the first creator partnership, let creators build with a smaller one, and see what the community does with it. She calls trust a muscle you have to build. Takeaway: Set up a test lane before you need one. Name 1 decision-maker, agree on the 2 or 3 brand guardrails that can’t move, and let the team and creators work freely inside them. Hold a small budget that doesn’t need a planning cycle to release. Start with a smaller property than your biggest one, and set a review date to decide what to keep, cut, or scale. Sponsored by Bloomreach FREE GUIDE: 6 monsters haunting your email program + how to defeat each 1. 👻 IN A MEME  OPEN TABS i'm going to be honest. i don't know what Rouge means for Sephora. But, good for us. Your friend, Daniel | ||||||||
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