How Canva Took Creativity to the Next Level with its Latest OOH Campaign

Discover how Canva's clever billboard campaign captures attention through creative product demos and learn key strategies for memorable OOH marketing.

Show, don’t tell

Grabbing the attention of your audience

Creating inside jokes with the audience

How this creative approach can inspire your own OOH marketing campaign

When it comes to out-of-home campaigns, how do you capture the attention of passersby? Many of us are familiar with what works in the digital marketing sphere—relatable text on social media reels, out-of-the-ordinary email subject lines, and digital ads that solve the target demographic’s problems. But with physical marketing products, it’s more difficult to understand what converts. What types of billboards, signs, flyers, or brochures are more likely to leave people wanting more?

Canva recently launched a clever out-of-home (OOH) marketing campaign that left audiences wanting more and marketers wishing they’d thought of it themselves. Learn what made this campaign so unique and how to employ similar strategies in your next OOH marketing strategy. 

Show, don’t tell

Canva users know its value for efficient graphic editing; the platform is known often as a more straightforward alternative to design platforms like Photoshop and Illustrator. In the brand’s latest marketing effort, it brilliantly utilizes billboards to promote some of its most valuable features, including the background remover and magic resize. 

Magic Resize

Photo Credit: Canva on LinkedIn

Get the dimensions wrong on your latest design? This billboard creates curiosity by introducing Canva’s Magic Resize tool, you can instantly reformat it. This design speaks to audiences in multiple ways:

1. It uses a relatable example to emphasize this tool’s value; it will allow you to fix your mistakes with just a few clicks, rather than having to start from scratch. 
2. The visual of the design outside of the frame has a humorous effect, delighting people who see it in the wild.
3. The billboard’s call-to-action is “Reformat with Magic Resize” rather than a straight-selling version like “Start using Canva today” or “Subscribe to a monthly plan,” giving viewers more of a chance to connect and want to learn more.

Background Remover

Photo Credit: Canva on LinkedIn

The billboard encapsulates the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Only three graphic elements overlay the brick image background: the Canva logo, the two users “on the design” in the upper right corner, and the Background Remover button with the name “Poppy” hovering over it. This design’s simplicity works to its advantage; it insinuates that there was once a different image there that had its background removed so the viewer can see through to the brick. 

Just like the Magic Resize billboard, this version incorporates humor to connect with the viewer. On the other hand, this design doesn’t include a call-to-action—a bold, but valuable choice because the visual tells a story that words can’t, enticing the viewer to explore the platform on their own.

Whiteboards

Photo Credit: Canva on LinkedIn

Canva’s whiteboard feature is essentially the digital version of a whiteboard; users can type in different sections, add photos, leave sticky notes, and more. But, you don’t need this prior knowledge to understand the tool featured on this billboard. Between the text reading “Ideas for a Canva billboard,” the variety of sticky notes, and the multiple users interacting with the whiteboard, the viewer can arrive at multiple conclusions: this tool is collaborative, organizational, and intriguing. 

This billboard also brings in elements from the other billboards included as part of this campaign in a sort of “if you know, you know” fashion. The sticky notes read a variety of phrases, including: 

• “GUYS…a billboard with no background for background remover,” calling back to the Background Remover design. 
• “The Product team wants us to somehow mention EVERY feature…” alluding to the campaign as a whole. 
• “Washing liquid, milk, bread” with a comment that reads “Wrong board, Carlos!” tying in a piece of humor and creating relatability with viewers.

Grabbing the attention of your audience

With OOH marketing, you have to create something that will encourage people to look up from their phone and learn more about your offering. Certain areas are filled with thousands of billboards that people ignore; if it’s just a wall of text, they might not take the time to read it. Using a creative approach provides a fresh take that many viewers may appreciate, rather than falling into the sea of signage.

Creating inside jokes with the audience

Canva users know these tools all too well. So, when they see these boards, they immediately understand the joke the company is trying to tell. This has multiple benefits:

1. It plays well with Canva’s somewhat humorous presence across their platforms, including social media and email marketing. 
2. Canva’s most loyal users will get another touchpoint with the brand, reinforcing their passion for the platform and inspiring them to share their thoughts with others.
3. Viewers who are out of the loop on the joke may feel FOMO and do their own research to be a part of the group.

How this creative approach can inspire your own OOH marketing campaign

Ready to build an out-of-home marketing campaign that captures attention? Take a lesson from Canva’s book:

• Lead with product demonstration over description: Understand your offerings’ main selling points and how they can benefit the lives of your target audience.
• Use the medium to your advantage: Consider how the medium, like a billboard, can influence your design’s physical placement, shape, or interaction with its environment. Rather than seeing a medium’s limitations, see how you can use its size, location, and brief viewing time as creative challenges. How can this specific space help you tell a story in a way that doesn’t work on other platforms?

• Create insider moments that reward brand familiarity: Develop creative concepts that make your current customers feel understood, turning them into advocates who share and explain the cleverness to others.

Canva’s innovative billboard campaign proves that effective out-of-home marketing isn’t just about shouting the loudest, it’s about being the most memorable. By transforming static advertising space into interactive product demonstrations, the brand created a blueprint for brands looking to break through the noise of traditional physical marketing. Each billboard works independently to showcase specific features while collectively building a cohesive brand narrative. This strategy doesn’t just capture attention, but creates lasting impressions that extend beyond the first viewing.

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