How Canva is helping the media industry compete in the visual economy
The digital shift has forever changed the way media organizations operate. Learn more about how Canva is powering the next wave of news and entertainment.
By Jonathan Harley — Head of Media Strategy and Development
At Canva, we value great storytelling. We also understand the creative process. At its heart, Canva is a tool for creatives and creativity. We’re on a mission to empower the world to design. One way we’re doing this is by transforming how the TV industry is pitching, creating and promoting productions of every shape and size. From shiny-floor shows to broadcast newsrooms, we’re partnering with TV producers and businesses to help bring creative ideas to life and take them to the world.
This is pivotal as we now live and work in a visual economy. We’ve heard all about the sharing economy, the gig economy, the virtual economy but overarching it all is the visual economy.
Because the digital revolution has powered a visual revolution — unlike anything we’ve seen in human history. Never before has there been so much visual content competing for our attention and affection. Because now that every business is a content business, it’s no longer about competing with other news or media brands, it’s about competing with every brand.
I recently had the honour of virtually presenting at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, where I shared three key ways any producer or production team can use Canva to compete in the visual economy and engage and grow audiences — all under the one roof:
1. Managing digital content and managing teams
Whoever you are, from a freelance director working on your own film, to a series producer or a social media editor on deadline, the ability to manage content is hard. There is a ton of it. Most of it sits on a hard drive or on rushes. And when it’s in an edit suite, it rarely sees the outside world.
You need to manage your teams and your content together. After all, your people are your most important asset. They’re your creative engine room. But if they’re not organised, you’re wasting time and resources.
With Canva, you can onboard people into different groups and teams and control what they have access to. The right people get connected to the right content. They don’t get lost in the matrix. Your content can be organised by folders and productions.
A great case of this is ABC Australia — the country’s biggest and most complex news provider and media organisation. The national broadcaster turns 90 next year and has undergone a massive digital transformation in recent years meaning it was well-positioned to benefit from integrating Canva into the core of its workflow across its entire news ecosystem.
Brand consistency has also been a core priority to the ABC. As a highly trusted news brand, it wanted to ensure its audience could easily and consistently identify ABC content. In 2020 alone, there were 65 MILLION new logos created in Canva. The battle of the brands only gets bigger. With Canva, you can upload your entire brand kit: marks, logos, fonts, brand colours etc. It doesn’t matter how many TV shows you have on the go, or news brands you are managing. With Canva, you can manage them and turn on brand controls that ensure that team members are operating within the right brand environment.
2. Designing across your entire workflow, from amazing pitch decks through to social media posts
The ease and speed of Canva mean that you don’t need to be a professional graphic designer or carry the cost of engaging one to bring your pitch to life. The team at Raindance Film Festival in London has been using Canva to power their sponsorship presentations, film school course materials, social media graphics, merchandise and more.
The TV and media industry is brilliant at creating visual communication and engaging audiences in its final edits. But today what goes ‘to air’ or is streamed is just part of the total output. There is so much visual content to create, we need to bring visual excellence across the entire production ecosystem. You need to manage this creative process at scale across everything — from pitch presentations to strategy documents to social content.
3. Engaging and growing audiences
The way in which Canva powers Social Media Teams is central to the value we bring to media businesses. Last year we really tested our enterprise product in newsrooms covering the COVID crisis. We knew that if we could stand up to those pressures of speed and reliability, we could stand up to anything.
A great example of this is the Gannett News Group in the US featuring brands such as USA Today and an array of regional titles like Arizona Central News.
AZ Central started using Canva in January 2020 — on the eve of the COVID pandemic.
None of this means compromising the quality of your content, or throwing out your existing tools. Your edit suite tools are powerful and essential to the magic you and your teams make. That’s not going away. Your skilled designers and creatives are skilled and creative which is why you don’t want to be wasting their time and energy on the relatively minor jobs that are more about managing minutiae.
Canva sits in that space that makes creating visual content both accessible and highly visual. It gives everyone on the team the tools to create, manage and deliver visual content with quality, speed and brand consistency.
We’re excited by the conversations we’re having across the TV and media industry to be a partner in the creative, content and engagement process. And we’ve only just begun.
