Ad of the month - Canva
This month we're looking at two of the most talked-about brands in AI-powered productivity: Canva and ChatGPT. Both have invested in big, surreal, story-led ads in 2026, and both set out to show how their product turns an idea into polished, inspiring work. But only one of them looks set to win the battle for Consideration.
This month, we focus our lens on the AI productivity space, where legacy professional brands like Microsoft and Adobe are increasingly facing competition from AI-driven, user-friendly alternatives like Canva and ChatGPT. Using our AI prediction tool, built upon millions of datapoints of real audience feedback and their reactions to creative, we compared several ads across these brands to find which is most likely to drive Consideration in the real world.
At Human Made Machine, we help you understand whether your creative will be effective with your target audience. This is crucial, since creative contributes up to 70% of a campaign's success.
We test thousands of ads each month in realistic, simulated media environments, using the gold standard of control and exposed experiments to predict real-world impact. In addition to brand KPIs, our services also look at Breakthrough, Appeal and Engagement: three key pillars of creative performance, each benchmarked against comparable creatives.
Our winner this month is a surreal, story-led ad from Canva that features a squirrel becoming a worldwide movement. In a product space that traditionally leans heavily into rational appeal to engage professional audiences, this ad suggests that consumers may actually prefer its tool providers to think outside of the box.
The Winner: Canva - 'The thing that makes anything a thing'
This is the kind of ad that might make you do a double-take: an opera-singing squirrel heroically warning a woman on a park bench that a space capsule is about to crash down on her. She's saved, the squirrel is declared ‘the thing’, and its fame snowballs: posters, a painted van, a Japanese game show and a flurry of followers in acorn berets. All because someone made something in Canva. While the imaginative story is the attention-grabbing star, the brand sits at the center of every step. This interweaving of clear branding and product within a visually and auditorily engaging spot is what sets this ad apart, and our AI prediction tool agrees.
The winning Canva ‘Squirrel’ ad is predicted to drive high incremental Consideration, and meets many of our proven creative best practices for optimal branding and attention capture. The ad’s highly distinctive visuals and audio excel at breaking through the clutter (Breakthrough score: 7/10) and keeping viewers engaged (Engagement score: 6/10), even though it struggles slightly with direct brand appeal (Appeal score: 4/10). Our tool shows that the ad could benefit from incorporating more rational product advantages and earlier branding, such as revealing the Canva brand earlier than 20 seconds into the spot and dedicating more time to on-screen demonstrations of actually creating with Canva.
How ChatGPT compared with a similarly surreal spot
ChatGPT's ‘In Harmony’ ad takes a similar but more conventional creative approach to demonstrate how its product translates an initial idea into a finished output. The visual narrative features an office worker dictating a request to ChatGPT amidst colleagues performing a choreographed dance, culminating with a completed launch deck on a laptop screen. While the product is prominently featured in action throughout the spot, the reliance on a standard presentation-creation use case and the absence of explicit branding until the conclusion limit this ad’s competitive differentiation. Consequently, our AI prediction tool assessed the ad with a low 3/10 likelihood of driving incremental Consideration.
Lessons learned
The Canva creative is not afraid to be weird, but keeps the product at the heart of the action. Every twist in the plot is driven by someone making something in Canva. And while most consumers may never encounter a use case quite like it in their everyday work, this ad excels at showing the breadth of what can be created with their tool.
Want to learn more about how to maximise the return on your ad spend with effective creative? Connect with us and request a demo.