How Canva Turned 14 Billboards Into a Live Product Demo

Canva turned 14 billboards into a live product demo in central London.

And every consumer brand I work with should be stealing from it...

Instead of app screenshots or a headline explaining the product.

Canva used every single one of their billboards at Waterloo Station to show a feature working on the wall itself.

Background remover
↳ The billboard's background is gone, leaving the brick wall behind it.

Magic resize
↳ A landscape design jammed into a portrait frame. "Turns out the 16x9 was meant to be 9x16."

Drag and drop
↳ A bike stuck to the frame, like someone dropped it in 2 seconds ago and wandered off.

I've never understood a software feature that fast from an outdoor ad.

My favorite was the one that looks unfinished.

A whiteboard covered in brainstorm sticky notes, put up as the ad itself.
One suggests "Washing liquid, Milk, Bread." Another says "Just a huge logo."

Bold move, and a smart one.

There are a lot of ideas you can steal from these billboards.

But here are the 3 most important lessons in my opinion:

1️⃣ Show the feature working

How Canva removed the background with Background Remover.
Make it THAT simple so anyone can get it in half a second.

Example: Show a size restocking live on the rail instead of captioning "back in stock."

2️⃣ Let the 'unfinished' version be the content

Nothing is funny after 5 rounds of rewrites.
And that's why Canva skipped that step and let the brainstorm be the ad.

Example: If you're a beauty brand, you could post the internal argument over a shade name instead of just dropping the final product shot.

3️⃣ Match the format to the feature

A resize tool gets shown resizing.
A drag and drop tool gets shown mid drag.

It's immersive, as all ads and billboards should be.

Example: If you're a skincare brand, you could show a serum sinking into skin on the billboard itself, instead of writing "lightweight, fast-absorbing formula" underneath a product shot.

Pretty much every brand tells you what their product does.

Not many let you watch it happen.

The ones that do are the ones you're still thinking about a week later.

(Like me, right now.) 

And that's the impact you want to create.

Where could you show your product working instead of describing it?

♻️ Repost if this is the first billboard that taught you a software feature.
And follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more on creative systems that show instead of tell.