Canva’s Erase Your Ex Makes Undo the Whole Brand Promise

The new film

Canva has replaced its long-running greeting with a bigger question: “What Will You Canva Today?” The North America brand platform, created with Goodby Silverstein & Partners, launched on Sunday 1 November during NBC Sunday Night Football with out-of-home, social and three TV spots. The film, “Erase Your Ex,” follows a woman tidying up photos of questionable former boyfriends. When one sends an “I miss you” text, she hits Undo and posts the restored photo, apparently for the world to see. It is a comedy of creative control aimed squarely at everyday Canva users who already know the tool for one thing but may not know how much else it can do.

The levers it pulls

The film works because it sells a feeling, not a feature.

• The IKEA effect. People value things more when they have made or personalised them. The woman’s edit is not a professional task; it is her own small act of authorship, and the restored photo becomes more satisfying because she made the call. Canva’s platform idea leans into this: in an AI-generated world where anything can be produced instantly, ownership is the scarce ingredient.
• Perceived control. The Undo button is the film’s quiet hero. Undo lowers the risk of trying, and the spot dramatises it as control over a personal narrative, not just a design command. That makes the product feel forgiving and powerful at the same time.
• Social identity signalling. Posting the restored photo turns an inside joke into a public declaration. The ad uses the edit as a badge of self-definition—one of the oldest reasons people create and share anything.

The bet the brand is making

Canva is placing a long-term bet that its brand can expand from a design tool to a creative identity. After nearly 13 years of asking “What will you design today?”, the company is swapping design for Canva as a verb, a deliberate move to hold websites, video, printing, social assets and more under one emotional idea. The risk is that a broad platform promise can sound generic. The campaign answers that with specificity: three short comedies about personal, workplace and school moments, plus out-of-home portraits that keep the unpolished, concentrating, tongue-out expressions intact.

Margaret Johnson, chief creative officer at GS&P, describes the strategic ambition as making “all of those possibilities feel uniquely personal.” The campaign is the first work from Canva’s partnership with GS&P, and the brand is clearly using human imperfection to stand apart from glossy AI-generated content.

What to borrow for your next campaign

First, turn one product capability into one emotional consequence. Canva could have demoed photo editing; it chose Undo as a life reset. Second, show the creator mid-act. The out-of-home series’ unpolished, concentrating, tongue-out expressions signal ease and personal investment more than a perfect output shot would. Third, use a daily question as a positioning device: “What will you Canva today?” invites habit and variety without itemising features. The sharpest lesson is restraint—if your product does everything, sell the one human feeling that matters most.

Watch the original: Canva on YouTube

Source: Campaign Brief