Deleting your ex from your photos is easy. Keeping them deleted after they text “I miss you” is apparently harder.
That is the premise behind Erase Your Ex, the lead film in Canva’s new North American brand campaign from Goodby Silverstein & Partners. A woman methodically removes former boyfriends from her pictures until one reaches out. She immediately hits Undo, restores him to the photo and posts it.
It is essentially a product demonstration disguised as questionable relationship advice.
The Feature Is The Joke
That is what makes the film work.
Removing someone demonstrates Canva’s editing tools. Undo demonstrates how easily a decision can be reversed. But neither feature needs to be explained because both are doing actual work inside the story.
Two additional films follow the same structure. In New Drink, a coffee shop team works through increasingly ridiculous beverage ideas before landing on a lavender latte and creating the promotional poster in Canva. In Promposal, a teenager repeatedly redesigns his prom invitation as potential dates become unavailable.
The products are always visible, but they never stop the story to become a tutorial.
That is a much better way to market software.
Canva Wants To Become A Verb
The bigger move is the campaign line itself.
After nearly 13 years of asking users “What will you design today?”, Canva is replacing it with “What Will You Canva Today?”
It is a small wording change with a pretty big ambition.
Canva no longer wants to be understood simply as a design tool. It now covers presentations, social posts, video, photo editing, websites, print and increasingly AI-powered creation. Turning the company name into the verb gives all of those behaviors one umbrella.
The accompanying outdoor campaign pushes the same idea through portraits of people mid-creation: a student doing all the slides for the group project, someone building a résumé next to their cat, a teacher making classroom materials.
What I like most is that Canva is not trying to prove its technology is impressive.
It is showing what happens when normal people use it for very normal, occasionally ridiculous things.
Software marketing loves features.
Canva found stories for them.