There’s a moment in most brand playbooks where scale becomes a liability. You hit 100 million users, then 200 million, and suddenly every social post feels like it’s being filtered through layers of global messaging. The result is safe, inoffensive, and forgettable.
Canva, with 265 million users across 190 countries, made a different choice.
In a conversation with Lachlan Stewart, the company’s Social Lead, one word kept surfacing: local. Not as a buzzword. As a strategy that’s reshaping how they think about a truly global brand.
“If you look at Canva in different countries, you’ll see real people and real stories from those markets,” Stewart explained in an interview. “When it comes to our marketing strategy, it’s really about being truly local.” That commitment to local culture over global homogeneity is what’s fueling some of their most successful campaigns.
Finding Culture You Can’t Buy
The best campaign ideas, Stewart suggests, aren’t always the ones you commission. They’re the ones that find you when you’re paying attention to local culture.
Take the UK campaign. Canva partnered with Gemma Collins, an iconic British personality known for being meme-adjacent in the best way possible. Instead of just featuring her in ads, they embedded her voice into the product using Canva’s voice-change feature and gave her a fake LinkedIn profile as the company’s new UK Creative Director.
The stroke of genius? It wasn’t just the partnership. It was treating LinkedIn like a new social playground. By publishing teaser content to her fictional employee profile before the official announcement, they created anticipation. The campaign exploded before most people even knew it was coming.
“When we’re the first to do something, that’s when we know we’re hitting the spot on social,” Stewart said. And he’s right. Since then, other brands have started mimicking the “fake employee” approach on LinkedIn, but Canva got there first.
In Brazil, they spotted a cultural joke that existed offline but hadn’t made the leap to social media. A MasterChef judge in Brazil is French, and locals find it hilarious that he needs subtitles despite speaking Portuguese. Canva turned that organic cultural moment into a campaign showcasing their auto-captions feature. The punchline already existed. They just gave it a platform.
The Difference Between Trending and Trendsetting
This is where Canva’s philosophy diverges sharply from the typical social media playbook.
Most brands operate reactively. Something trends on TikTok or Twitter, and within hours, 50 companies have jumped on it with awkward posts that feel two years behind. Canva explicitly avoids this trap. “Our sweet spot is when we’re driving cultural conversation, as opposed to jumping into an existing one,” Stewart explained.
Instead of asking “What’s trending today?” they ask “What insight can we explode into a moment?” That’s a fundamentally different question. It requires deeper cultural literacy and more creative risk-taking. It also means sometimes your idea doesn’t land. But when it does, it doesn’t feel like everyone else’s idea.
The counterintuitive part is that being first is actually less risky than jumping on established trends. When you’re early, you own the narrative. When you’re late, you’re competing for scraps.
Social Needs a Seat at the Strategy Table
One of the more refreshing things about Stewart’s approach is his insistence that social isn’t an afterthought. It’s not the channel where you repurpose assets created by other teams. At Canva, social strategists are involved from the very beginning of campaign development.
“I come from a creative agency background where it took a lot of convincing to be included early in those creative, strategic conversations,” he noted. The difference at Canva is structural. Their teams are collaborative. Social has a voice when the big ideas are being shaped, not when they’re being packaged for distribution.
This matters because social-first thinking changes decisions. Instead of asking how to adapt a campaign for social, you’re asking how to design it for social from day one. That’s why the Gemma Collins teaser campaign worked so well. It was built for the platform, not retrofitted to it.
The follow-through matters equally. After a campaign launches, most brands declare victory and move on. Canva treats launch as a midpoint. They have a suite of assets ready to extend the conversation across platforms, keeping the momentum alive long after the initial spike.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Here’s where many marketers miss the mark. They measure everything by the same yardstick: likes, shares, comments. Stewart argues that’s backwards.
“You should look at what you’re posting to decide how to measure it,” he said. A two-minute entertainment video should be measured on view-through rate and shares, not just likes. A tutorial should be measured on saves because viewers are essentially bookmarking it for later reference. The metric should serve the objective, not the other way around.
This requires resisting the urge to flatten all social performance into a single number. It’s messier. It’s also more honest. You stop comparing a brand anthem to a how-to video and start asking whether each piece of content did what it was supposed to do.
The Bigger Picture
What’s happening at Canva isn’t just a business success story. It’s a philosophical shift about how scale and authenticity can coexist.
The instinct when you grow globally is to strip away the rough edges, to create a version of your brand that’s palatable everywhere. Canva did the opposite. They leaned into the rough edges. They doubled down on specificity. They made bets on local culture that wouldn’t have registered on a global dashboard.
The result isn’t just more engagement. It’s the kind of brand presence where people in Brazil, the UK, and everywhere else see themselves in what the company is doing. That’s a harder thing to build than a slick global campaign, and infinitely more valuable once you pull it off.
The question most large brands should be asking themselves isn’t “How do we scale social?” It’s “How do we stay local while we scale?”
