Participation beats passive attention. Make the brand additive to play, never an interruption. Then measure it with the same rigour as every other channel.

Latham leads brand partnerships and advertising at Roblox, which she describes as bringing brands along on the adventure. We always say culture is created on Roblox, she says, and she has a frontline view every day of how Gen Z and Gen Alpha connect, create and communicate. Her job is to find ways for brands, at scale, to meet that in a rich, immersive storytelling canvas, on a platform that brings people together across ages, generations and locations.

With over 120 million daily active users for almost three hours a day, Latham thinks of Roblox as an amusement park with something for everyone: building, role play, strategy games, fashion design. The magic is that people do it with friends. The old stereotype of a gamer alone in a dark basement is a narrow definition. When you expand the aperture of what is possible in a participation type platform like ours, she says, there is something for everyone.

Everything at Roblox is designed creator first and user first, so a brand gives people something additive that increases their play. Rewarded video is her example: you can buy it elsewhere, but on Roblox it enhances a user's playtime with a way to power up, creators get better economics, and the brand earns a positive association. That win-win-win cycle, she says, drives all of their ad product development.

Latham is candid that building on Roblox is not for every brand, which is why there are entry points for everyone. Brands have to be honest about structure and infrastructure. As in the early days of social, if you lack the setup you get sniffed out quickly and lose the community. The ones that succeed are clear on the value of their IP, like the NFL extending seventeen games to 365 days a year.

Any brand should be thinking about Gen Z and Gen Alpha, not just to advertise but to understand how they connect. This generation goes from digital to physical and back: at school, home and creating on Roblox, then sports practice and back again. It may be a few steps ahead of the measurement, Latham says, but it is all one connective loop. Not every brand should build an always-on experience, but there is a way for every brand to reach the community.

Latham frames the job as meeting the market and making the market. You meet it with standard formats and programmatic video that buyers understand and can feed into media mix modelling. The harder question is future value: an avatar wearing Adidas Samba sneakers for two weeks, three hours a day. Intuitively marketers know that is worth more than a billboard in Times Square, but the industry hasn't caught up, and that is where she sees Roblox going from one to ten.

She calls the current moment the messy middle. Early on they forgot about meeting the market and had to slow down, because it is crawl, walk, run and very few marketers go straight to the sprint. Now there are standard products that prove brand outcomes, and the work is to bring everyone along, including the IAB on immersive standards and new containers for measurement. It is an industry problem, she stresses, not a Roblox one.

Real talk, Latham says, it's been a little bit of the Wild Wild West. This year Roblox introduced an independent ads policy with a registry, mandatory from January, so every brand collaboration with a developer is registered and the rev share is clear. With more than seven million experiences it is a big, messy ecosystem, and the guardrails are meant to keep things fair without limiting anyone. Brand Link pre-vets creators, influencers and dev studios so a brand can shortcut finding the right partner.

Latham treats creators as consultants and strategic partners, not a standalone media channel. The best work comes from brands that say, you understand this community, tell me, and then lean in and listen. A brand that arrives saying it knows best keeps the partnership transactional. Authenticity matters hugely to these generations, and creators live and breathe it, so they can be very helpful if you let them in.

She wants Roblox measured with the same rigour as every other channel. Some parts, like the Sambas example, are not there yet, but everything else carries standard measurement: brand lift, engagement, time spent. Bringing brands to the Roblox Developer Conference to see the community makes the work tangible, because the person buying or measuring often isn't the daily user. At the end of the day, she wants it measured in the outcome the brand is hoping to drive.

Latham points to e.l.f. Cosmetics' Glow Up, where you build a business empire and the brand values are embedded in the gameplay rather than a straight makeup game, and Dress to Impress, refreshed with new capsule collections every week. Grow a Garden, a bit like FarmVille on Roblox, had 40 million plus people playing at once on a weekend, returning every Saturday for the latest seed pack, with Travis Kelce launching a football seed. Roblox is sort of replacing the Saturday morning cartoons, she says, and brands are following, from the NFL to FIFA during the World Cup.

Safety has been built into the ethos across Roblox's 20 years, Latham says. The recent launch of facial age recognition, now completed by almost 60 percent of the global user base, means a parent knows what content a child sees and an advertiser knows who they reach is who they say they are. That feeds targeting too, so a partner like Mattel can reach a younger cohort, or a studio can match a release to the right audience across seven million experiences.

Latham says people is the core of everything, and her first 18 months were about skills, structure and gaps, learning from peers at companies like Uber who had built new businesses inside established ones. On talent, she argues that marketing is a human connection and still based on relationships no matter how fast AI moves, so she looks for people who are adaptable, curious and versatile. She also cites Andrew Robertson of BBDO on healthy paranoia: someone who cares enough to make sure the team asks the right questions and ships the best work.