- 1 year ago
Zach Kitschke, Javier Meza, and Jessica Jensen in Conversation at Cannes Lions 2025
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00:00I'm Elsa Kislasi. I'm Variety's international editor and we're gonna talk today during this
00:14last session about innovating for the future and I have great inspiring CMOs with me. I have Javier
00:22Javier Bardem from Coca-Cola Europe from Dublin. Very nice to meet you. I have Zach Kitschke from
00:33Canva based in Sydney right and have you Jessica Jensen from LinkedIn and you're based in San
00:40Francisco. Okay that's great so we're gonna talk right now about how you guys are strategizing
00:47for the future incorporating new technology tools AI and working with new partners and integrating
00:53all that in your processes. So I would love to hear you know first with you Javier if you can tell me
00:59about your leadership and how it's evolved in the past year. Wow it keeps evolving. Thank you for
01:08having us today here. Before answering that one important idea I would like to leave all of you
01:13with is it's so important also that identify what is not changing right when it comes to marketing
01:19it's still about understanding people it's still about going deeper into insights it's still about
01:25exciting seducing people with our brand solution so that's that that's not changing. What we keep
01:31changing and and that's the leadership part is making the teams aware that technology is there
01:38for us to do everything I said much faster better and really differentiating from other brands
01:45and it's embracing risk if one thing I could say to my team is take the risk. What about you Zach?
01:52I think for us you know it sort of evolved on two fronts really I think obviously we have this
02:00incredible community that now create with Canva all around the world there's 250 million people each and
02:06every month 100 million people every week that are coming to the platform to create you know
02:10everything from social graphics to videos presentations t-shirts you know anything you can
02:15kind of imagine and the platform was sort of born of this idea of taking an idea or a goal that someone
02:21might have and really quickly getting them to the end outcome and obviously AI has like totally
02:26transformed how quickly we can do that so a lot of what we've been building on the product side has been
02:31you know features like magic design being able to describe what you want with a prompt and
02:35have something ready to go you know translation of campaigns with a click we just announced actually
02:42integrating Google's VO3 model so you know generating video assets and sort of graphics and so that's on
02:48I guess the external side and I think for our customers it's really about how do we keep
02:52reimagining what is the the kind of new quick ways that we can go from idea to outcome and then for
02:58our team it's been how do we sort of stay ahead in terms of how we're building products and services
03:03and sort of reimagining our own workflows I totally agree with you that there's a lot that actually
03:08isn't changing and the fundamentals you know remain the same but now to research a new product and get
03:15a very very quick understanding of how community might react or prototype a concept or spin up a mood
03:21board for a spot like you can do that stuff like this and so I think that's the really really exciting
03:26thing that's really great it kind of raises the bar for creativity and what about you Jessica over at
03:32LinkedIn well I can't agree with Javier more human connection and love is what makes the world go round
03:39AI is an assist it is the robots are not taking over I'm at LinkedIn we have a billion members around the
03:47world and millions of businesses obviously we're using AI night and day to storyboard campaigns do video
03:55editing copy testing managing campaigns internally synthetic brand research so we're marinating in it and
04:04building in it every day I think two pieces of advice I give to my team and to myself is that AI for
04:11efficiency is table stakes AI to drive customer growth revenue is the frontier and so actually link you know
04:23some people say just play with AI just experiment you have to build to drive growth and making that line
04:32very clear I think that that's the world that we're in right now which is exciting and also intimidating
04:39let's be honest like I'm trying things I'm not very young I'm failing I'm learning and we have to be
04:48honest with ourselves and each other that we are going to mess up and we need help are there any new
04:55roles that you've created at your companies do you feel like there are a new set of skills that are
04:59needed to navigate this kind of new environments absolutely yes I think especially in marketing you
05:07need to be humble keep learning I agree I mean I disagree as long as you learn you are not old
05:13as long as you learn you are super young and this is something that you keep especially in marketing
05:18right humble learning taking risks and something that I believe I agree with you on this what is
05:25basic which is efficiency however the efficiency is going to free up time to do the other things
05:31when it comes to AI at code we're doing exactly that is imagining how we can enhance the consumer
05:37experience and I can give you later more examples on that but also how to make our core operations
05:42more efficient from using agents to harness insights from using gen AI to produce content
05:50all of that allows us to free resources to do the other part
05:54what about you Zach new roles yeah I mean I think it's fundamentally evolving everyone's role
06:02and so something that we've really uh lent into at Canva is training and enabling people to play
06:08one thing that we launched a couple years ago was our AI school and so you know everyone in the
06:12company can access the latest training on the tools we sort of opened up access we've got a very liberal
06:18approach so people can have access to whatever model they want to kind of dabble with and play
06:22we've created real communities internally so we kind of had this AI everywhere sort of mantra over the
06:28last two years and created communities of AI champions that share and that's been super inspiring
06:35seeing just how different people are kind of connecting the dots and one role that I would
06:38say is definitely emerging particularly in marketing um is sort of this like systems engineering role
06:44and it's sort of a non non-technical engineer uh but really really great at figuring out how to
06:50solve for workflows and put the pieces together um so enabling more people uh to sort of lean into
06:56that space like that's definitely a skill set that we started hiring for that's really cool and over at
07:01LinkedIn are there any also uh new um skills you were talking about those skills I wouldn't say so
07:07many new roles I would say new skills and we are telling everybody's I think similar to Canva
07:13you are a builder if you work at this company and you care about growth and helping members you are you
07:21are a builder and you will learn to be a builder and so that's brand strategists learning to create
07:28campaigns with Canva and other amazing tools thank you we love Canva um and and you know executives I
07:38have to build agents myself right so that is I I think the skills of flexibility adaptability willing
07:45to test and learn figuring out the end business objective that you're trying to drive and building
07:53the agentic capabilities to drive that right like everybody you know uses uses AI to summarize documents
08:01or email whatever that's great that's the efficiency but what am I going to build myself that is going to
08:08allow me to reach customers engage them and drive to a sale like that's what we need to do and I need to do
08:16and do you feel also that uh you've like maybe give it can you give us a like a specific example
08:23of like a campaign you worked on or a challenge you faced in one of the you know the processes where
08:28AI helps you kind of get your way out of it well the one I remember we did in Christmas last year
08:36something um called create your own magic and was basically the idea of empowering people to use
08:42gen AI to create things instead of we doing for them we said again you're gonna do it of course we
08:48had to sort a lot of technical considerations legal considerations data privacy consideration but it
08:54was nice at the end of the day was people cure scanning QR codes on coke and then having a live
08:59conversation with Santa which is which is something that is that that was really cool and and I had a
09:05couple of conversations with Santa and at the end of the day that would create a branded snow globe that
09:11you can send with family friends and it's very consistent with the idea of coca-cola at the end
09:16of the day is just trying to put a smile in people's face it's that little moment of happiness every day
09:21and taking that into the gen AI solution that's a great idea what about you Zach a fun one who here
09:30saw the canva wrap last year a few people um so we launched our enterprise products uh last year
09:37at our big event canva create and we were trying to come up with a fun way to do so and we actually
09:42had this community member roger coles who was making all these social videos like fan videos um
09:48uh and songs about canva and so we actually approached him to do a rap uh about enterprise uh and
09:55i'm not gonna try um and uh you know um it's definitely worth having a listen it was like
10:04it got a mixed response i think definitely divided people um some people loved it other people thought
10:08it was very very cringed but it was incredibly impactful um and drove uh you know a ton of
10:14morality it was shared all over social i think we had like 50 million um uh sort of engagements uh
10:20went you know all over the press as well it drove uh two and a half thousand percent uplift in search
10:25for canva for enterprise at that point in time um and actually uh that was actually created and
10:31sort of built out with with ai sort of taking the story and what we were launching um we sort of
10:35mood boarded it and tested it as well so that was a fun one that's cool anything yeah mine i'm going
10:41to take you to non-sexy town so if you could you imagine on linkedin we're running you know 50 100
10:48campaigns across linkedin for different audio sec audience segments all the time so we have built an
10:54agent that is called that we have an internal name but we call it lol linkedin on linkedin oh that's
11:02cute and so this agent allows you to put in message audience creative run the segmentation deliver the
11:11campaigns it is a massive massive efficiency gain for us and now we need to do that more externally
11:19that's cool and some people tell me also that uh you know the one thing with ai is that you can
11:27create a lot of interactive tools as well and it's something that gen z are really fond of have you seen
11:33that as well totally and and the example i was giving to you that's that's it um and we keep trying to
11:41find the communities and create that excitement among communities and because of that is not only
11:46jai we're using a lot of creators influencers we use more than 10 000 globally creators influencers
11:53and we combine combine them with the technology and the partners but also with the brand marketing assets
11:59you name it fifa world cup um euro cup we just announced that we're going to be um sponsoring the
12:06english premier league so in yeah that's so cool in that community i'm available yeah we can create
12:14a lot of excitement in the community using the technology tools yeah oh that's great so yeah
12:20you were talking about creators you're talking about uh partners partners yeah yeah and uh what about
12:27you zach uh yeah i mean similarly i think there's um there's so much that's that's sort of exciting for
12:34us um you know at the moment i think one thing that we've been really focusing on as a brand is
12:38really flexing into our different markets around the world and so you know cam was born in australia
12:43the us has long been our biggest market but the last kind of year we've been investing in building
12:47out regional teams and sort of letting letting folks uh experiment and so some of the um you know
12:53the latest work that's been coming out has been really really fun we launched um something in
12:57the uk this week a really fun kind of out of home campaign taking some of the pain points that
13:03that marketers and creatives are feeling that feel uh and sort of blowing it up into custom out of
13:08home builds so you know make the logo bigger and it's like a takeover or a canva whiteboard
13:14um with posted posters of like what the campaign should be um and so you know our teams are kind of
13:19uh really being encouraged and sort of flexing into that but there's really that local nuance and
13:24it's sort of like it's of the community what about you over alindi so we have just recently
13:30launched ai job search so i don't know if you've noticed the world of work is exploding collapsing
13:36shifting uh very a lot of people millions of people struggling to find jobs and so we have built
13:44an ai job search that allows you to use natural language and describe what you'd like to do
13:50i have an architecture background i want to work outside i want to work part-time in london
13:56and it will open an aperture to new work opportunities that you would never have discovered
14:03if you put in finance manager chicago so this is exploding the idea of job search and you being
14:12able to describe your experience your desires and discover new work it is transformational
14:19that's amazing wow um and what about like other tools other than ai like other like digital tools
14:27that you're that you may be using are there any yes in in our scale um efficiency is super important
14:34so we are investing a lot in predictive analytics models to optimize resource allocation and using ai
14:41to optimize the actual models as we get new data this is very important as you can imagine when you
14:47operate in 200 countries there's a lot of data that you can use to make your operations more efficient
14:53uh another thing that we are doing again with partners and rafa bro here he leads global design
14:58for us he just is a partnership with adobe to use ai to enhance the way we create toolkits
15:06so there is a lot of work on this what we call making our job more efficient
15:11uh and we will continue experimenting i i wouldn't say that we have all the answers
15:16another idea for everyone is remember that digital transformation is never a one-time event
15:22it doesn't have a start and stop it's a mindset and digital transformation is the way of living for all
15:28of us that is the bad news and the good news yes definitely zach other other technology tool that you
15:36may be using uh yeah i mean there's a ton one tool that we started using uh a little while ago now
15:42is a tool called magic brief that we actually announced we acquired last night yes um and
15:47they're they've been amazing their their whole premise is really helping creatives get the right insights
15:53to create the best creative and what they've built in terms of plugging into your ad platforms but then
15:58being able to report out an individual creative asset level performance what drives impact um
16:03has like been super transformative for us really understanding what what messages are working
16:08even what hooks uh you know and i think the the ability to take that insight and then scale it
16:13right through the funnel from like statics to like fast social videos through to kind of full tv and
16:19and sort of out of home campaigns um that's been that's been one that is very cool and over at linkedin
16:25i mean we use a number of external tools but again i'll go to what we're building so we linkedin has an
16:32incredible audience of leaders businesses and our targeting is some of the best in the world if you
16:39you know if you want to reach workers and business people so we are now building synthetic consumer and
16:46customer research models that allow you to do you know i want to i want to do research on small business
16:52owners in australia who do advertising and i'm testing this concept this message line etc we can do that
17:01with a synthetic model for zero dollars in hours wow so think about how much money you are spending on
17:11research and you can do it with with our data and our audience amazing notes taken yeah yeah exactly
17:23everyone is taking notes here um are there any like uh trends that are you you're forecasting you know
17:31as marketing executives i think this whole notion of using uh agent agents it's already happening in
17:39our personal lives right a lot of apps more and more that's going to be part of marketing and part of
17:45that of course i was in a session this morning with other partners the idea of optimizing our content for
17:52uh answer engine optimization i think that's the immediate next frontier we spend a lot of time in
17:58the last 20 years optimizing search engine right now then i think is is that as we know young people
18:05are using all these on gen ai tools to do search and we need to be ready for that yeah definitely uh i think
18:14the big one and the theme that i'm like hearing loud and clear this week is just the resurgence of
18:20creativity uh you know as everything else is kind of being commoditized and optimized it's like
18:26actually the great differentiator um and so i think more and more brands and and sort of business leaders
18:33i think are gonna kind of understand that and i think we'll see a lot more investment in creativity
18:37and brand building and also all those things that that really become the true differentiator yeah like
18:42back to the basics basically what about you i think b2b is not boring and we thank you and it is incumbent
18:54upon us to make it fun and exciting and ai will help us video is exploding on linkedin if you thought you
19:03should write a white paper shoot a video instead we have got to get zesty about b2b marketing we can
19:13we will it can be funny and it's on video and it's on linkedin we will end on this fantastic note thank
19:21thank you so much it's been you know i've learned so much over the last few days
19:33you
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