Read Time: 2 mins, 58 secs

Harley Block is the CEO and Co-founder of IF7 - a marketing and partnerships agency that helps brands like Starbucks, Spotify, and Coke, connect with Gen Z.

IF7 understands consumer marketing better than just about every other company I’ve seen.

They’ve been the driving force behind Abercrombie’s resurgence. And they have the network to stitch together very unique activations across influencers, Fortune 100 companies, and cult brands.

FAVORITE TAKEAWAYS

We’re only doing 1 takeaway this week because it’s such a cool story:

• The story behind IF7’s deal with Home Depot and Roblox

Listen to it on the podcast or read the write-up below👇

BREAKDOWN

A Deal with Home Depot and Roblox

Harley and his team saw a bunch of brands building games on Roblox. Brands were spending 6 and 7 figures to develop these games, but there was one problem…no one was playing them.

This didn’t make sense. Roblox was insanely popular.

(fyi, Roblox is an online platform that hosts video games that anyone can create — kids to professional gaming companies)

IF7 saw this as an opportunity. “How can we solve that problem? How can we help brands meet people inside of Roblox games?”

The IF7 team started playing these games on Roblox. They wanted to know how the environments work. They studied how brands were showing up in the games. Harley also got the inside scoop from his 9 year old son, who is a big Roblox guy.

Then the Home Depot opportunity came up. HD hosts regular workshops for kids at its stores across the country. They’ll give kids supplies, tools, plus an orange apron, so they can build something at the store. It’s an educational way to connect with future customers (pretty brilliant).

They’ve been doing this for 25 years and wanted a way to commemorate the anniversary.

IF7’s idea was to recreate these workshops inside of a Roblox game. This would give HD exposure to thousands of more kids.

So IF7 partnered with a game called Red Cliff City — kind of like the Sims where your character is a regular person that completes every day tasks.

Inside of Red Cliff City, they built a virtual Home Depot (photo below). They had details down to the font used on the price tags.

Inside the video game version of Home Depot, they set up these workshops where you build stuff as if you were at the in person workshops. If you play the game and complete the workshop tasks, you earn exclusive items.

Driving Traffic to the Video Game

Red Cliff City was able to drive organic traffic to their virtual Home Depot through in-game notifications and gamers discovering the store within the game. In turn, this drove real life traffic to physical Home Depots.

But IF7 didn’t stop there. They did 2 other things:

1. Partnered with a TikTok influencer family called the RoyaltyFamily (right in their target demographic)

2. Put physical marketing collateral inside real HD stores to make people aware of the game. There were also QR codes to help convert people into actually playing the game.

The result?

Tens of thousands of new kids started playing the game every week. A massive win for Red Cliff City and Home Depot.

This has been so successful, that IF7 has a 100% return rate with their customers that they’ve built similar Roblox activations for.

📚 Previous Editions

Justin Rowe - Co-founder / CMO @Impactable [Ep. 1]
Marketing Max - Founder @Growth Daily [Ep. 2]
Angela Kayal - CRO @Help Scout [Ep. 3]
Morgan Ingram - Founder / CEO @AMP [Ep. 4]

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