Make It Unbelievable - Canva | Clapboard Ad Archive
Make It Unbelievable, the 2024 campaign from Canva and UltraSuperNew for the Japanese market, lands squarely on the tension between democratized creativity and disbelief by letting two of Japan’s most iconic on-screen figures, Takeshi Kitano and Gekidan Hitori, play out the psychological hurdle at the heart of everyday design empowerment — the suspicion that something that looks this good couldn’t possibly have been made by an amateur. Ostensibly a showcase of Canva’s accessible platform and drag-and-drop tools, the multi-channel Film campaign for the electronics category thrives on a sharply constructed narrative in which Kitano dazzles Hitori with a pitch-perfect presentation, only for Hitori to stubbornly refuse to accept its provenance. The escalating back-and-forth turns skepticism into humorous deadlock, using the pair’s well-established celebrity personas to ground the story and deepen its cultural resonance for Japanese audiences. In doing so, the campaign leans directly into the very argument skeptics present: if anyone can create professional-grade graphics and presentations using only templates, fonts, stock imagery, video, and audio assets, can those results really be believed when they arrive without formal design pedigree? The answer — playing out across national TV, YouTube, and social channels with media handled by IREP — is that Canva’s promise to empower anyone to design inevitably produces moments that outstrip expectation and invite disbelief. By framing the product benefit as the story engine, with Canva’s professional results catalyzing social drama and comic escalation, the campaign sits firmly within what Clapboard’s taxonomy classifies as FORMAT#6—Benefit Causes Story, in which the plot is both literal proof and dramatization of the brand proposition. Even in a market crowded with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft PowerPoint, Figma, Piktochart, and Visme, Canva, through UltraSuperNew’s comedic lens, refuses to market feature lists, choosing instead to dramatize the human response to creative empowerment: surprise, skepticism, and ultimately, the assertion that boundaries between expert and amateur are obsolete. Clapboard rates this 63/100. Campaigns like Make It Unbelievable mark a shift for the electronics and visual communications sector, reminding brands that the strongest storytelling comes when the audience’s disbelief becomes a strategic creative asset.