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- [00:00]
Fergus O' Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O' Carroll in Chicago. We are the official podcast partner of the EFFIES Worldwide, which is what led us to New York City last week for the effie's award gala. We had a brilliant time, met a lot of people who have been on the show, but we hadn't met in person before and also saw just a ton of great work. And it's always good to see people getting awarded for work that is truly effective. And B2B was really interesting this year. A number of awards were handed out in that category, which is also relevant to today's episode. We know Canva as really initially a B2C play. It was started in Perth, Australia in 2013 and has grown to have today 220 million monthly active users with revenue of $2.7 billion. And so really extraordinary growth. When you look at their numbers, particularly over the last four years, it's been terrific. But part of their growth plans forward is to expand into B2B. They've sort of, you know, they've sort of indirectly ended up in B2B through individual users using their own accounts. But as a SaaS platform, they're really looking for sort of an enterprise sales opportunity in major companies. So we are going to have a conversation today about their new B2B campaign and about their point of view on how a product like Canva can work in an enterprise system. So this is Christine Segrest, global head of consumer marketing for Canva in San Francisco, and she's joined by Kat Vanderwerff, executive creative director for Canva in Sydney, Australia. Kat runs their internal creative department or their sort of internal agency, and they are the folks who created this new campaign. So this is a conversation about Canva and its efforts to get into the B2B segment in a big way. Enjoy. One of the interesting things in a few episodes we've done recently is some brands that are not moving, but they are adding a B2B component to their offering to their brand, to their target audience. And it's not that it's changing products dramatically, but it's recognizing that some brands are more flexible in how they can stretch and some other brands need to sort of make adjustments to certain attributes or certain aspects of service, depending, depending on what category you're in when you move into B2B. Because B2B is a different buyer, it's a little bit more dynamic. The expectations can be sometimes pretty different. So an example of that recently, if you want to go back and listen to it is Uber for business. And a couple of key points came out of that. I thought that were pretty interesting about that evolution to B2B. We now today have Canva, a brand that built an amazingly strong multi billion dollar business off of an innovative approach. And we'll hear more about it in a second and is now expanding into B2B. And so we're here to talk about that expansion and the new campaign that's come out of that. So it is great to have both of these folks with me today. Welcome, Kat.
- [03:26]
Kat Vanderwerff
Hi. Nice to be here.
- [03:28]
Fergus O' Carroll
And Christine.
- [03:29]
Christine Segrest
Hello. Great to be here.
- [03:31]
Fergus O' Carroll
We are really happy to have you. Your CMO Zach was on a cup maybe last year and we talked. He was part of a panel discussion that we had. So we talked a little bit about, about how Canva originally grew and it had phenomenal growth. But because it was a panel discussion, we didn't have a lot of time to dig into it. So I thought that we could actually start this out. Christine, with a little bit of a background on what Canva is and you know, the source of that extraordinary growth in those early years, because it's been around, I think 10 years.
- [04:06]
Christine Segrest
I think, yeah, a little more than 10 years. So yeah, it's been an incredible journey. And to put it quite simply, if folks don't know Canva, it's an online visual design or communication platform, which sounds a little fancy, but all that means is it's essentially this simple one page interface where you can create anything you set your mind to. So you could develop social media posts, you could develop a presentation, you could do visuals, you could create docs, whiteboards. So kind of of if you can conceive of it, you can build it on Canva and a little bit of just the background. Our founder Melanie had this vision around Canva when she was back in Perth teaching design to students. And she thought, wow, it just, it feels hard. It feels like it's more complex than it needs to be. There's a lot of fragmentation. And what if we brought that all into one simple page and just made it dead simple, intuitive for folks so people could just open the platform and just start designing right away. So that was sort of the bedrock of the vision. And then in terms of the growth, it's incredible. Today, you know, 225 million people around the world use this platform. Which is, which is wild.
- [05:25]
Fergus O' Carroll
I mean, that is wild. I mean, stop for a second. 200. This is a founder who, from my understanding, she started off, as you say, she was a teacher, then she Started doing. Was it yearbook designs or was it something that she started?
- [05:40]
Christine Segrest
I know this better than I, because you've been around for this, but yeah, the first prototype, the first use case essentially was creating yearbooks. I mean, to that.
- [05:49]
Fergus O' Carroll
Unbelievable.
- [05:50]
Christine Segrest
I mean, some of the tools in the marketplace are great tools, but they just take a bit of learning, right? You don't open it up and essentially anybody in any department or any capacity can start designing right away. So I think we can owe a lot of this growth to the fact that all of a sudden it wasn't just the 1% who were empowered. You didn't have to be a designer by trade or an art director, but you could really be anyone who had an idea that you wanted to render and bring to life. So you could use Canva to kind of bring the 99. The rest of us, I'm part of the 99%, bring them along so they could start feeling that kind of empowerment more at their fingertips.
- [06:31]
Kat Vanderwerff
We're obviously talking to people who may not perceive themselves to be creative or to be designers. Like, we believe that everybody is born creative, but it's something that kind of gets like, you know, taken out of you as you kind of move into your career in adulthood and to like, really help people reconnect with that creativity. It wasn't about, you know, how do we actually connect with anybody and help anybody feel like they could personally design. And that was the. The kind of biggest challenge, making sure that everything is approachable. Everything is almost like a work in progress. Like it has that imperfection and celebrating that imperfection so that it doesn't feel unattainable to the everyday folk.
- [07:13]
Fergus O' Carroll
So before we move on, just going back to that growth, 225 million users today, 10 roughly years in business. Was there a point, Kat, where marketing spend kicked in and did that sort of take it from being word of mouth to then suddenly seeing this hockey stick of growth once marketing spend began to be deployed? Or what do you think triggered that sort of hockey stick approach? Volume?
- [07:41]
Kat Vanderwerff
I definitely think in any company's growth, there's a point where word of mouth is going to plateau without the additional kind of marketing spend to help to boost that. And so we saw that, I think, like, probably, I would say five years ago, we really started to look at, we have built this amazing product, we've got this amazing community, People love it, people talk about it, but how do we kind of take that next step and building the brand and starting to put to look at our marketing as well?
- [08:12]
Christine Segrest
I think what we're pushing into now is giving space for a bit more emotive storytelling that helps to bring our brand personality forward and expands the role that we can deliver for people and the way we can bring more value, maybe beyond how people have engaged with us in the past, letting us push into that broader space and doing it in a way that I think reflects on our sense what we were saying, cat magic in the middle, where we can help people achieve real outcomes, but do it with a sense of creativity, playfulness and humor that's very true to our DNA. It's allowed us to both meet people where they are with performance and expand our conversation with brand.
- [08:55]
Kat Vanderwerff
Yeah, I do too think that for Canva, brand and product are like incredibly interlinked. There's sort of no, there's no disconnection between the two. Like often you can work on a brand and the product is almost an afterthought or, you know, like emotive brand spots where the product doesn't really play a central point. But for all of our storytelling, it's always been about how is the product at the center of the story and really the protagonist that everything's built around because the brand stands for empowerment for everyone. And that's what the product does too. It's just really intertwined.
- [09:32]
Fergus O' Carroll
What was the motivation for going after the B2B segment? And do you think you have a completely different buyer and therefore it needs a different approach?
- [09:43]
Christine Segrest
Christine, I don't think in every instance, I mean, I think one thing we tried to do is look at how people are using our product organically. And we observe that in 95% of the Fortune 500 companies, people were using Canva, they were using it at work, maybe they were using it, maybe it.
- [10:02]
Fergus O' Carroll
Was a different as an enterprise wide SaaS platform or their own personal account things.
- [10:08]
Christine Segrest
They were using it, signing up with their work, emails. So we were able to go into all these large organizations and we have a lot of conversations today from a sales perspective to say, hey, just so you know, you have thousands of people in your organization using Canva today and they're doing all kinds of interesting things. They're making presentations, they're lighting up your social media, they're making videos. So it was very clear that this was happening anyway. Our community was embracing Canva for personal uses, but also bringing it into the workplace to solve workplace problems or because.
- [10:44]
Fergus O' Carroll
It'S so much easier to use than Microsoft, than the keynote.
- [10:47]
Christine Segrest
It's ease. Ease is a piece, but I think it's also the impact of communicating something Visually, you know, think if you're trying to like pitch a new idea or close a deal or inspire your team, it's, you know, it's trite to say a picture's worth a thousand words, but we've all gotten those dry documents that just feel like a chore. I think people are realizing the impact of taking an idea, executing it in a way that's very visual, very accessible, and people are just getting better outcomes.
- [11:16]
Kat Vanderwerff
It's also very, very purposeful growth. Like our mission is to empower the world to design and that literally means the entire world. And so we've always had this sort of pyramid where at the bottom of the pyramid is all about like the most broadest possible use cases and the individual users and the big populace where we want this really, really valuable free tool. And then as you move up the pyramid, you've got your small to medium businesses and then your enterprises and then professional designers at the top to the 1% that Christine talked to. And so our past decade where we've kind of got to now is like really empowering individuals. And so the focus for the next decade is like moving up to that empowering enterprises space.
- [12:02]
Fergus O' Carroll
We'll be right back. Want always on brand metrics that deliver value to stakeholders. This episode is brought to you by Tracksuit, a beautiful, affordable and always on brand tracking tool that helps consumer marketers and agencies answer the question is what we're doing working? A not so secret fact is that companies pay $100,000 or more for brand tracking, which is out of the question for many modern brands whose budgets are under pressure. Tracksuit provides enterprise level brand tracking without the big price tag. Their in house research experts do the heavy lifting using best in class practices to craft and launch your survey and get you results fast. Tracksuit is fast becoming the common language for marketers and agencies to measure and communicate the value of brand building. Check it out@gotracksuit.com that's gotracksuit.com. now back to the show. And so when you look at it strategically, I try to think who we had on here recently, which was a SaaS platform, but they talked about the fact that they recognized that they were going after a different buyer because it was an enterprise wide buyer and they had had significant growth with working with individuals but it needed their marketing, needed to sort of play to different triggers. And the new buyer, it might be a chief technology officer or somebody who's buying Enterprise SaaS. Did you recogn that you had that new buyer even though you'd come in saying that you had individual people who are already using it. What did having that new buyer require you guys to do? Both from a comms perspective and from.
- [13:55]
Christine Segrest
A sales perspective, I think we talk a lot about bottoms up and tops down. So the bottoms up are the people, you know, the people working in large organizations or organizations of all sizes who are using Canva anyway. And we're having these great outcomes. But I think what was new for us is to think, as Kat said, very intentionally about who are those decision makers in large organizations. So part of what we had to understand is what's important to those decision makers and making sure that our product could meet some of those needs. So these will be folks who are more concerned about compliance, security, also understanding a use case for, let's say like a big company like FedEx for example, who has 1400 teams in 40 countries, they need to make sure that their brand assets, their fonts, their photography, their color palette, their templates can be not only accessible to all the teams, they can be empowered to design and create, but also has some governance. Right. So it's a bit of freedom in a framework, the brand is lucky lockdown to maintain integrity. So we built a brand hub to allow big organizations to do that. And you know, that's something I think is very appealing to more of these decision makers. So that was what is a bit new for us. And I think some of our communications are more broad, so we're speaking to both of those audiences and some are more tailored. We tend to do some more laser focused decision maker extensions to some of our campaigns to really connect with those C suite folks who will be looking at that really important consideration sets that I just described while still making sure it's a really valuable product for everyone working in a big organization.
- [15:48]
Fergus O' Carroll
So, you know, one of the interesting things is I think a lot of brands and startups face this. It's sort of understand you're not a startup, but understanding that most times you're not bringing a totally new product, you're bringing a partially new product and you're trying to dislodge a massive user base if you're a challenger of any size. I mean, I'm curious, what's the pitch? When you go to a CI as Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer, is it that your value proposition is better value? Is it better usability? Is it more, as you said earlier, that it can be used by people who don't have the sophisticated design skills you're dislodging, like probably at least Microsoft PowerPoint, what's the pitch?
- [16:34]
Christine Segrest
I would say we aren't always coming with a dislodge message. It's a really big space and I think the needs in organizations are changing with the product.
- [16:42]
Fergus O' Carroll
But I gotta think that there's no organization out there that doesn't already have PowerPoint or Keynote for their everyday users. So you are kind of saying you don't really need that, you just need us in essence.
- [16:56]
Christine Segrest
Well, for some organizations it's a presentation use case if they're very focused on visuals. But for many organizations, I think think we do tailor the pitch. But I think what's the connective tissue across everything is how can you empower everyone in your organization? And many organizations are large and they're disaggregated. And I think a big part of that pitch or discussion is often about scale and efficiency. You might have a really small group of designers. It's not reasonable that they're going to be doing design approvals for every single piece of content that's created across an organization. Or you want your small maybe group of creatives to feel like an army of a hundred. Well, how are you going to do that? Right? How are you going to scale across your org?
- [17:45]
Fergus O' Carroll
There's also a huge slice of the population, young adults who are coming up having used Canva and you're not going to be able to force them to use Microsoft anymore. So I think there's that brilliant market that's emerging into the enterprise space that is going to be naturally comfortable with your products.
- [18:05]
Christine Segrest
We do also a lot around education and you know, we're very fortunate to empower teachers and schools and you know, a lot of young adults. So they do absolutely come into the workplace with this mental model of what's possible and an expectation around the tools at their fingertips to help them be successful.
- [18:23]
Fergus O' Carroll
So let's talk about the, the new work. So tell us Kat, about the process of getting through into this. Where did it all start for you guys? Was there a brief, was there a word, was there a thought? Was there an unlock moment that was brought to you that sort of said, okay, here's where we can all head down conceptually where we can begin the process of developing concepts.
- [18:46]
Kat Vanderwerff
I think from everything we've just spoken to. The biggest business challenge is the perception shift that Canva is not only good for personal use, but it's also good for work. And so that's really kind of one of the key metrics that all of this creative led us up to is like, can we actually really Shift that perception of Canva being good for work and not just for play. And so as we looked at the creative brief for this, we kind of really looked at people in the workplace and all of those users that we've talked to, whether it's the marketing team or the sales team or the hr. And the mindset we wanted to connect with was like, you know, those go getters in the office. We kind of of like, termed it as like the everyday. Leslie. Nope. Like, just, like, there for it and like caring so much about what they do and, you know, wanting to make sure that care comes through and you. And the output and the. And the. And. And everything that they create and communicate with, but feeling stuck because the tools get in the way. And so that led us to this creative strategy, which I do have to shout out to Lindsay, our creative strategist, did an amazing job of bringing the brief. But we had this existing campaign platform called Love youe Work. And it was something we wanted to continue to build equity in. And Love youe Work is sort of this twofold thought about that one, that people want to get recognition in the workplace for the amazing work that they do. So you're like, I love your work to a colleague. And that's like a really great feeling, but then also that personal feeling that you have when you're just like, loving what you do because you're in the flow and things aren't getting in the way of you being able to achieve your goals.
- [20:34]
Fergus O' Carroll
And then where does it go creatively? Do you guys develop multiple ideas over time?
- [20:40]
Kat Vanderwerff
The place we started for this one and in the concepting stage, we actually started with a writer's room because we really wanted to focus on the storytelling approach for this campaign. And we have a checklist framework for storytelling. We have four things on the checklist. The two are the most obvious. So what is the. The biggest problem that we can solve? That's just something. A problem that's felt by many, many, many people that they can relate to. How does Canva solve that problem? And then the two other points are, how do we bring product to the center of the story, as we've talked about? And then the fourth one is how do we create sizzle? So how do we create something that people actually love to watch? And it gets talked about and it gets shared because it's just the, like, a beautiful, emotive piece of storytelling versus something that feels like an ad. The way that we got to lots of ideas quickly was I had recently been in this workshop with Nicole Belloc, who has an organization called Ideas Bodega. And she taught me this technique called the how to method. And what you do is you have. You take the broad, the big, broad challenge, and then you go, what are the barriers? And like, what is standing in the way of us achieving this challenge? So from that you find like all these different, smaller barriers. You take the barrier and you flip it into the positive and create almost like a micro challenge out of that. So to give you an example, our big, broad challenge is how do we help people reach their full potential using Canva presentations? From that, a barrier to that is like, lots of people actually just hate presenting. Like, it's not something that they love to do. So when you flip that to a new challenge, it's like, how might we help people fall in love with. With presenting? And you get to kind of like a pythia thing to build an idea around. So we did lots of that. We had many, many, many of these micro challenges.
- [22:35]
Fergus O' Carroll
Try and explain the film. And then we're going to drop it in here, but maybe just give us a 20 second description and then we'll drop the film in and then we'll talk about the other aspects of the campaign too.
- [22:47]
Kat Vanderwerff
Yeah. So I guess the story behind the film is really based on this idea of a misdirect. And so we start in this space where you have this couple and they're in therapy. And so you're kind of getting into that and you're like, okay, couples therapy. But then she says, it's your presentations, they're bad. And you realize, oh, these aren't actually a couple, they're colleagues. And so that misdirect and trying to create twists in the story along the way keeps happening. And so further on in the film, you are are kind of still in the space of the therapy office, but we swing the camera to a window that reveals an entire office floor. And everybody's there for it because it's this intervention from the whole entire office. Like, they're all already using Canva and they're like rooting for this guy because he's the last one to switch. And so that kind of flip is like, oh, okay, we're actually not in the therapy room anymore. We are in an HR office. And this is not a therapist. She's the HR lady.
- [23:52]
Fergus O' Carroll
Now, what's interesting is that the therapist is actually Lorraine Bracco of the Sopranos fame. She was Tony Soprano's therapist in that series. How difficult was it or how easy or challenging was it to get Lorraine to do it because she hasn't played that role or a version of it in an awful long time. My God. Sopranos is probably. Is it gone for like 20 years already?
- [24:19]
Kat Vanderwerff
I'm like something like, I think with Lorraine. So we were looking for a character to play this role who was obviously an iconic therapist in culture, but more on the fictional side. We didn't want to use a real therapist because I guess treading that line of serious therapy versus the playfulness we wanted to bring to it. And like, surprisingly, Lorraine was just super excited about the role and we kind of didn't expect that. We thought we might have to fight for it for a bit, but she was really, really excited. So that was. That was awesome.
- [24:53]
Fergus O' Carroll
And the thing is not evident. If you just hear the spot, hopefully people will see it or have seen it out there. This is a relatively new campaign. The villain is the archaic software that other people are using. It's that idea that things are not simple, that things are too complicated, and that there needs to be a better solution. So that's a very obvious part of it. So there's these characters, there's the younger girl and then there's the middle aged guy. And the middle aged guy is representative of that more archaic, embedded way of doing things. And this younger person is coming in representing the Canva brand. And it's the implication, well, maybe you should start.
- [25:37]
Christine Segrest
Everything's feeling a bit predictable. He isn't willing to try anything new or exciting.
- [25:42]
Fergus O' Carroll
I see. I thought you liked the way that I did.
- [25:47]
Christine Segrest
I get the job done. Okay.
- [25:49]
Fergus O' Carroll
This is a safe space, but we really need to do the work.
- [25:55]
Christine Segrest
It's your presentations. They're bad. Bad, bad, bad. There was the quarterly review, employee training week, Gary's retirement, and even the office pet policy.
- [26:05]
Kat Vanderwerff
Sounds boring.
- [26:06]
Christine Segrest
This template is timeless. I mean, sometimes I mix things up. Oh, last week I learned how to use the transitions. Oh, man, look at this. Epic, right?
- [26:20]
Fergus O' Carroll
Looks like 1996.
- [26:25]
Christine Segrest
And let's not forget the annual review. The main old S for success. Boom, boom.
- [26:32]
Kat Vanderwerff
Broke the arm.
- [26:34]
Fergus O' Carroll
That one hurt. That's a powerful realization.
- [26:39]
Christine Segrest
Show him the thing.
- [26:41]
Fergus O' Carroll
Canva.
- [26:42]
Christine Segrest
Canva. It's easy.
- [26:45]
Fergus O' Carroll
Oh, wow.
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Kat Vanderwerff
You made that?
- [26:49]
Christine Segrest
You made that for me?
- [26:50]
Fergus O' Carroll
I literally did it at lunch. Okay, so I'm super curious. In B2B, how do you extend the campaign? Where are you deploying against scalable audiences in social and with other content? How have you approached that?
- [27:30]
Christine Segrest
There's going to be those channels that are more mass where you'll see this program, whether it's just tent Poles that index well against folks in large organizations. So you'll see this campaign and things like March Madness, for example, and other kind of lean forward moments. But we also really look to find contextual environments where you would sort of have that work mindset, whether it's the New York Times or Fast Company or Wired. We also look to align with podcasts where you are sort of in that that mindset of more kind of your work hat on. So how I built this might be an example. We did some custom content with Morning Brew, for example, and we also did some really targeted out of home in places that are just highly trafficked for, you know, lighthouse organizations that are kind of relevant to what we're doing and are places where people are just commuting into work. So like Hudson Yards in New York could be an example, commuting on the 101. And you'll see this around San Francisco with NSome and other relevant spaces. So we did all of that, but then we're doing things that are also even more targeted. So things that we're doing with B2B life cycle and email, the ways that we partner with our frontline teams who are focused on customer success, some of the really targeted social media where we're doing extensions onto LinkedIn and then aligning with thought leadership pieces we're dropping. We just did something recently on the state of AI. So we're really thinking about how all this comes together through all of our channels, our partners from the really kind of mass which will be relevant to everyone that we're speaking to, to how we get very, very targeted, even down to the one to one level level.
- [29:24]
Fergus O' Carroll
So Kat, what surprised you the most about developing this campaign and deploying it? Were there any lessons or anything? Any sort of light bulb moments for you where you were like, this makes a lot of sense and maybe that even will work in B2C.
- [29:38]
Kat Vanderwerff
We actually haven't pushed this much into humor before with our brain. So it's been a really fun process. And I think that's the learning process that we've had is like when you tap into humor, you do tap into that sense of joy that people have when they're loving their work and that feeling of being in the flow or like kind of achieving your ambition and that kind of thing. And so I do think that humor has helped a lot. Yeah.
- [30:03]
Fergus O' Carroll
So how about for you, Christine, what recommendations would you have? Because I wouldn't describe you as a B2B marketer. I mean, you're a marketer. But is there things that you might recommend to people who are B2B marketers about things to be conscious of when you produce a campaign like this.
- [30:20]
Christine Segrest
There's very few actual human beings you'll meet who are a B2B human being or B2C human being. These complexities, we have these different roles and we're moving really seamlessly between spaces within any given day. So I think pulling back and really trying to understand who you're hoping to connect with or influence and taking that broader context into mind is going to help you be more successful.
- [30:47]
Fergus O' Carroll
It is Kat Vanderwerff, executive creative director at canva. She's in Sydney. And it's Christine Segrest, global head of consumer marketing for Canva and she's in San Francisco. Thank you to both, both of you for your time today. A real pleasure.
- [31:02]
Christine Segrest
I love that. Thank you, Fergus. What a great conversation.
- [31:04]
Kat Vanderwerff
Yeah, awesome. Thank you.
- [31:05]
Fergus O' Carroll
And we will see everyone on the next episode.