Canva has completely changed how the world creates visual content by simplifying visual communication for individuals, teams, and businesses, enabling everything from social posts to presentations to be made effortlessly. The brand aims to become the ultimate destination for both professional and personal visual communication, serving a wide range of users, including Consumers, Knowledge Workers, Small Business Owners, Students, Educators, and Content Creators.
Owing to the vastness and diversity of the Indian subcontinent, Canva wanted to reach Indian audiences effectively and connect with them across regions, languages, and consumption habits in environments where attention is scarce and storytelling can land effectively. They wanted to come across as a go-to solution for design, and this is where M+C Saatchi Performance stepped in to execute a multi-format, always-on campaign approach.
The primary objective was to drive brand awareness for Canva at large among Indian users. Beyond visibility, we wanted to build top-of-mind recall, expand the pool of users that Canva could later retarget for acquisition, and introduce potential users to the brand’s unique features and benefits clearly and compellingly. We aimed at creating solutions that deliver high reach at an efficient cost while making sure that the messaging resonated.
From a media perspective, the goal was to deliver incremental reach efficiently by combining premium OTT inventory with complementary high-attention audio environments. The campaign aimed to balance immersive storytelling with cost efficiency, while ensuring the audiences reached were relevant, high-quality, and aligned with Canva’s long-term growth.
India’s media ecosystem is highly fragmented across devices, languages, and formats. The challenge was to identify platforms that could deliver both growth and cost efficiency, while still maintaining contextual and audience relevance.
Other than platform selection, the campaign also needed to ensure that messaging worked equally well across screen-led environments like CTV and mobile, as well as screen-light environments like audio streaming, without losing impact. Managing frequency across formats while avoiding audience overlap was critical to maintaining efficiency and recall.
With high-attention video and audio environments emerging as key drivers of awareness in India, our strategy focused on building a connected, multi-format ecosystem where OTT delivered immersive visual storytelling and audio streaming extended reach into moments where screens weren’t always present.
We aligned creative, media, and channel strategy to ensure Canva showed up consistently, clearly, and memorably, regardless of how or where audiences were consuming content.
Creative Strategy
The creative approach for this campaign was built around the concept of “Design for Everyone,” which used a tone that felt accessible, empowering, and inspiring. It focused on storytelling of everyday situations in the lives of students, small business owners, creators, and professionals, where Canva naturally fitted into their use cases.
To keep the narrative engaging, the approach relied on:
Beyond the core narrative, the creative strategy also ensured that each asset performed effectively within its environment. Assets were adapted to suit both screen-led and screen-light formats, ensuring consistency in messaging while optimizing for how audiences consume content in each channel.
Creative versions were developed for CTV, mobile, and audio streaming platforms.
Localization played an important role across all formats. Creative adaptations were delivered in multiple regional languages, with language and cultural context tailored to ensure resonance across India’s diverse audiences.
Media Strategy
The first step in our media planning process was to thoroughly understand India’s content consumption habits, which span Connected TV, mobile devices, and increasingly, audio streaming platforms. By segmenting audiences across these environments, we were able to tailor formats, placements, and frequency to match how users naturally interact with content throughout the day.
For OTT, we plotted the landscape across key variables, including user base size, average time spent, popular genres, audience age affinity, and content resonance, to identify platforms with the strongest reach potential. This was supported by geographic analysis across urban, semi-urban, and rural markets to understand the demographic strengths of each platform.
OTT platforms were then grouped into two clusters:
Budgets were allocated strategically within these groups to balance national scale with strong regional penetration, supported by frequency caps to maintain healthy exposure.
To extend reach beyond video and capture high-attention moments where screens may not be present, audio streaming platforms were layered into the media mix.
Spotify was onboarded first, followed by JioSaavn, selected for their high reach, strong regional language penetration, and audience profiles that closely align with Canva’s target segments.
Overlap analysis confirmed minimal duplication with OTT audiences, allowing audio to drive incremental reach efficiently while maintaining controlled frequency.
Channel Strategy
We executed the campaign with a programmatic-first approach, for its ability to provide dynamic access to high-reach inventory, robust reporting, comprehensive metrics, and precise frequency management. This also enabled us to structure the campaign clearly across CTV and mobile, and audio streaming, each with its own delivery logic and KPIs, and helped secure optimal deals with platform partners.
On CTV, contextual layers were applied to keep placements relevant to viewers’ content choices and to maximise engagement in a high-attention environment.
On mobile, targeting was refined further by focusing on users with comparatively more expensive devices priced above an internal benchmark, capturing higher-value segments that show stronger adoption potential for design tools.
For audio streaming, activity began with Spotify, where we activated both video and audio formats. Delivery was segmented by language and region, supported by multiple creative variations supplied by Canva.
Following performance evaluation over the initial two months, JioSaavn was onboarded as an audio-only channel, leveraging regional-language creatives to deepen reach across India’s diverse linguistic markets.
A geo-based budgeting model ensured investment followed platform penetration across states and audience clusters, optimising for reach, efficiency, and significant visibility in markets where Canva’s proposition resonated most.
The campaign delivered 300 million+ impressions at a cost well below typical OTT seasonal surges, even during high-demand periods like Independence Day, the Asia Cup, and the festive season.
We reached over 80 million unique viewers, with an average frequency of around 6, driving 60% incremental reach in Month 2 and a further 22% in Month 3. Video completion rates also exceeded 90%, indicating strong engagement across both CTV and mobile environments.
Audio streaming helped us reach further, connecting with more audiences without overpaying for frequency.
From August to November, Spotify and Saavn helped reach 19.8 million users with a 96% completion rate, achieving CPMs that were more efficient than typical audio benchmarks in India, while delivering consistent incremental reach month on month, and maintaining a controlled average frequency.
The campaign achieved its goal of driving awareness for Canva among Indian audiences with broad visibility, effective delivery, and significant incremental growth.
With careful planning and execution, we helped Canva stand out in India’s congested OTT and audio streaming landscape, where every brand is fighting for consumers’ attention. By getting ahead and securing the right mix of premium video and audio inventory, we maintained efficiency even during the busiest periods. Our collaboration with Canva shows that with data-led planning across channels, seasonal spikes can be turned into opportunities for lasting brand growth.
“India is a complicated market. Audiences are fragmented here, and attention is hard to earn, and the timing needs to be very strategic. For Canva, the focus was on reaching the target group without oversaturating communication, particularly across OTT and audio platforms. Our team planned the media mix carefully and made sure that the execution used programmatic controls to manage reach and frequency efficiently. And, we could definitely say that the incremental reach garnered during a highly competitive period for this campaign delivered expectations successfully.”
“The campaigns run by M+C Saatchi Performance helped us expand Canva’s reach efficiently across India. We were looking to scale media efficiently across video & audio streaming environments, connect with diverse audiences, and control pacing and exposure. M+C Saatchi Performance delivered on the asks with a programmatic solution, and also delivered strong incremental reach during a highly competitive period.”
