MAM
Canva India’s ‘Hysterical Historical Café’ playfully unlocks creative brilliance
Mumbai: Canva, a visual communication platform, has launched 12 short ad films as part of its ‘Dil Se, Design Tak’ campaign in India.
The campaign features ‘Hysterical Historical Café,’ a concept that transports Indian audiences to a world where historical figures face modern challenges, showcasing Canva’s capabilities. Set in a café where different eras converge, the ad films depict characters like Christopher Columbus using the magic eraser, the Wright Brothers using magic design, and a knight creating a business idea with magic media. These films highlight Canva’s user-friendly tools in a humorous way, demonstrating their application in everyday scenarios.
Conceptualised with OML Entertainment, the campaign illustrates how anyone, from individuals and solopreneurs to businesses, can easily create visual content on Canva. The campaign uses a multi-channel approach, including TV, to reach a broad audience of consumers, professionals, enterprises, students, and creators.
“We’re thrilled to introduce the ‘Hysterical Historical Café’, a set of quick-witted ad-films that perfectly encapsulate Canva’s commitment to simplifying visual communication and making it more accessible,” said Canva India growth and marketing lead Chandrika Deb. “By blending humor with practicality, our goal is to highlight Canva’s many use-cases as a versatile visual communications platform empowering everyone from individuals to small and large enterprises in India to unleash their creativity. As a part of our ‘Dil Se, Design Tak’ campaign, we aim to connect with over 100 million active internet users and build deeper resonance for Canva in the Indian market.”
“Working on Canva has been a wild creative ride for all of us at Only Much Louder. Our unique ‘Brands As Creators’ framework is all about turning brands into storytellers that can truly entertain in order to connect with audiences. With a sharp comedy writer like Manaswi Mohata on board, we knew we could push the envelope. When we set out to show how Canva makes design accessible to everyone, we figured, why limit “everyone” to just us everyday humans? Why not dinosaurs, mammoths, queens, Nobel Prize winners, and even our prehistoric ancestors? The fun was in exaggerating not just with words, but with over-the-top setups. Honestly, we couldn’t have pulled it off without the trust and conviction of our incredible partners at Canva who didn’t just tolerate our craziness, but encouraged us to go even wilder!” said Only Much Louder SVP & executive creative director Manav Parekh.
Launched recently, Canva’s latest brand campaign, ‘Dil Se, Design Tak’, highlights the power of using Canva to transform ideas into reality; encouraging individuals from small to large enterprises to express their creativity at work. India has quickly emerged as Canva’s fifth-largest market, experiencing remarkable growth in 2023.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
