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.
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
