On March 5th, the Ad Council launched the Love, Your Mind World on Roblox—the first nonprofit experience dedicated to supporting teen mental health on the platform. Developed with guidance from leading mental health experts, this immersive world was designed to meet teens where they already are spending their time, while equipping them with valuable mental health resources in a safe and engaging environment. The new experience is available at www.roblox.com/loveyourmind. You can view a trailer video here.
Teen mental health is a pressing issue. In fact, a majority of Roblox users ages 13-17 (72%) agree it's very or extremely important for them to actively take care of their mental well-being, but more than half (55%) say they have no knowledge to a moderate amount of knowledge about how to do it, according to a Roblox Research Panel fielded September 2024. Recognizing this gap, we aimed to leverage the Roblox platform to meet teens where they already spend time, providing tools and strategies to support their emotional well-being in an engaging way.
The Love, Your Mind World was designed to feel both welcoming and interactive, integrating mental health education into engaging gameplay. To ensure a meaningful and enjoyable experience, we collaborated with experts from Roblox, dentsu and The Gang, as well as Headspace, a leader in the wellness space, to build a world that teens would want to visit and return to.
Key Features of the Love, Your Mind World:
Three Interactive Obby Zones:
- Friendship Forest: Helps teens recognize that asking for help is a sign of strength.
- Mindfulness Mountain: Offers guided mindfulness exercises to manage stress.
- Labyrinth of Light: Guides players through challenges to build emotional resilience.
- Custom UGC Wearables: Teens can claim exclusive digital fashion items by completing quests, in partnership with e.l.f. Beauty, Pacsun, Walmart and Headspace.
- Guided Meditations: Free audio and video content from Headspace to help teens stay grounded and reduce stress.
- Safety-First Design: To create a secure space, usernames are anonymized during gameplay and chat features are disabled.
- Creator Amplification: Popular gaming creators @lilahbloxy and @kvssidy shared their gameplay experiences to encourage their followers to explore the Love, Your Mind World.
- Partner Amplification: In addition to providing custom UGC wearables, e.l.f. Beauty and Walmart helped direct more people to the Love, Your Mind World by providing one-way portals from their popular Roblox experiences.
Key Learnings from Building the Love, Your Mind World
If you’re a nonprofit or brand marketer and interested in bringing your brand into the Roblox ecosystem, here are some key learnings to help drive success.
Assemble the Right Team & Partner with Experts - Success in building immersive experiences starts with building the right team. Bringing expert partners to the table ensures a collaborative process and a high-quality end product. We strategically partnered with:
- Roblox: It was important to start with the platform itself to ensure we aligned on the mission of building a world for teens to support their mental health. Having Roblox on board from the beginning helped open doors for us.
- Dentsu Creative Agency (Strategic Roblox Partner): dentsu brought essential knowledge of gaming culture and brand integration to help us shape the Love, Your Mind World.
- The Gang (Experienced Roblox Developer): As one of Roblox’s top developers, The Gang brought expertise in building branded Roblox experiences.
- Mental Health Experts: Leading mental health experts guided the content to ensure it was safe, supportive and addressed the top concerns for teens in the US.
Leverage Roblox’s unique features as a platform - Roblox users expect gamified content that feels natural to the platform. We leaned into user behavior and the platform’s native features to build a resonant experience, including:
- Phased Content Rollout: Instead of launching all 3 obbies (gamified obstacle courses) at one time, we released them weekly in March to maintain interest and encourage repeat visitors.
- Gamification: Integrating mental health strategies and coping mechanisms into quests and activities to make learning fun and engaging.
- Custom UGC as Motivation: Teens were motivated to complete quests to unlock exclusive digital wearables such as the “Walmart Wings Backpack” and “Shady as elf Sunnies”.
- Roblox Media & Marketing Tools: We ran both portal ads and sponsored tiles, ad products unique to Roblox, to drive traffic to our experience (which ended up being the top traffic driver), as well as a sponsored search boost for users searching for our world.
Build Strategic Brand and Platform Partnerships - One of the most important aspects of building and promoting the Love, Your Mind World was partnering with leading brands and a popular Roblox world, Track & Field: Infinite, to amplify our reach and enhance user experience. Each partner was uniquely selected as they have their own initiatives supporting teen mental health and have a presence within the Roblox ecosystem.
- Brand Collaborations: Partnering with brands like e.l.f. Beauty, Pacsun, Walmart, and Headspace allowed us to integrate relatable wellness content and UGC items that teens wanted to earn and wear. e.l.f. Beauty, Pacsun and Walmart funded the minting fees associated with bringing their custom UGC items to the Roblox marketplace and shared the experience through their own channels. Additionally, e.l.f. Beauty and Walmart provided one-way portals to drive traffic from their popular Roblox worlds to ours and Headspace provided free guided meditation and mindfulness exercises featuring two of its expert meditation teachers, Eve Lewis Prieto and Dora Kamau.
- Roblox Developer Community: We collaborated with Track and Field: Infinite, a popular Roblox game, to create one-way portals that seamlessly guided users to our world.
Creator Strategy: Tapping Into Roblox Influencers - The gaming community on Roblox is driven by creators who shape trends and influence user behavior. Given this, we knew that partnering with creators was an important piece of our go to market strategy. By leveraging the creators’ social presence, we were able to tap into broader online communities. To maximize engagement, we:
- Partnered with Popular Gaming TikTok Creators: We collaborated with @lilahbloxy and @kvssidy - each creator developed custom content and shared their experiences within the Love, Your Mind World, encouraging their followers to visit our world.
- Twitch Live Stream with e.l.f. Beauty: We also partnered with Anna Bynum (e.l.f. Beauty’s Gamer in Chief), who livestreamed gameplay on elf’s Twitch channel, e.l.f you.
Social and Earned Media Amplification - To ensure broad awareness and sustained interest, we developed a multi-channel promotion strategy to extend the campaign’s reach:
- Owned Media Activation: We utilized the Ad Council and dentsu’s own channels, including blogs, podcasts and social media, to amplify the campaign’s message.
- Partner Social Amplification Toolkit: We created a comprehensive social amplification toolkit for all partners, including suggested copy and visual assets, to support them to uplift the launch..
- Earned Media Coverage: We worked with dentsu and other partners to secure press coverage and podcast features, such as with the Brands in Play podcast.
Impactful Results
All of our marketing tactics proved successful. As of 3/28, just three weeks since launching, the response to the Love, Your Mind World has been overwhelmingly positive:
- 641,000+ world visits
- 452,000+ learning quests completed
- 108,000+ guided meditations performed
- 80% of users reported feeling more confident managing stress and mental health
- LYMW Outperformed all other Charity & NGO Roblox experiences by 1,322%
- Average 21k daily active users with a visit time of 5.8 minutes
- User Feedback: 94% said they “liked” or “loved” it
Final Thoughts: A Blueprint for Marketing on Roblox
If you’re considering building a world in Roblox, I hope these learnings help guide your journey. Of course, creating a dedicated world isn’t the only way to integrate into Roblox. There are other approaches, like building an experience within an already established game, as some health and beauty brands have done, or utilizing Roblox’s unique advertising capabilities such as sponsored tiles, portal ads or a search boost.
We decided to go big and build our own world to learn as much as possible and have the experience available for future activations. While it was ambitious, it has enabled us to get mental health resources to over 600k teens, provided invaluable insights and opened up new opportunities for future nonprofit initiatives on gaming platforms.
By prioritizing safety, leveraging platform-native features, fostering strategic partnerships and maintaining a comprehensive marketing strategy, brands and nonprofits can create impactful Roblox experiences that resonate with young audiences. As gaming and immersive technology continues to evolve, the potential to combine play with purpose is limitless. Through collaboration and innovation, we can build more gamified experiences that educate, support and uplift.