Imagine creating a campaign in Canva, looking at the finished design and thinking ‘That would look bloody good on a billboard’.
Now imagine that billboard sitting inside a racing game, seen by the exact audience your brand is trying to reach.
That’s the promise behind Ads by Livewire, a new integration launched today by Australian founded gametech company Livewire, which allows Canva users to turn their designs into in-game ads without leaving the platform.
The partnership marks the first gaming integration in Canva’s App Marketplace and could significantly lower the barriers for advertisers wanting to tap into gaming’s enormous audience.
B&T sat down with Livewire co-founder and co-CEO Indy Khabra to discuss how the platform could turn a process that once involved specialist teams, negotiations and weeks of planning into something far closer to buying a social campaign.
Marketers are now able to build a creative in Canva, choose their audience, location, campaign dates and budget, preview how their ad will look inside a gaming environment and submit it for review. Campaigns are then reviewed within 24 hours before going live.
Advertisers can choose between campaign lengths, set targeting parameters and see a forecast of the reach their budget is expected to deliver as they build the campaign. And unlike traditional gaming campaigns, which have often required brands to work with specialist teams and negotiate inventory with individual publishers, Ads by Livewire starts from $500.
“The idea around Ads by Livewire in Canva was really about making gaming as easy to buy as advertising on social,” he told B&T. “Social is really easy. It’s a really simple workflow, and so that’s what we were aiming to do here.”
He said advertisers can select an ad format, targeted geography, campaign dates and budget before using Livewire‘s Gamer.ID audience intelligence platform to target from more than 1,000 proprietary audience segments.
Previously, Khabra said, advertisers wanting to enter gaming would often need to access specialist buying platforms and negotiate with publishers to secure the right inventory.
“The traditional workflow tends to have levels of fragmentation which can be a barrier for some marketers,” he said. “We believe that this is a real way to bring in a lot of advertisers that can leverage gaming and gaming audiences that aren’t doing it now.”
A $500 entry point for advertisers that may never have considered gaming
The lower entry price is one of the biggest changes the new platform brings to the market.
Rather than requiring advertisers to commit to a large bespoke gaming campaign, marketers can start with $500 in their local currency and receive a real-time forecast of the impressions and reach that budget is expected to generate.
Increase the budget to $5,000 and the forecast changes automatically.
“The goal is to engage those marketers that are not leveraging gaming as part of their marketing strategy,” he explained, describing the opportunity as particularly exciting for businesses that may not have previously had the tools or resources to access gaming audiences.
That does not mean Livewire is turning its back on major brands. The company already works with large advertisers on more ambitious managed campaigns.
Instead, Ads by Livewire is designed to open another door.
“There are 3.5 billion players and most brands can’t buy them. Not because the audience isn’t valuable, but because there’s been no identity layer to connect them. That’s the gap we built Gamer.ID to close.” “You have an existing consumer that you might be finding on CTV or streaming, and that same player is now playing their games, and so you’re only capturing them potentially in one place,” Khabra said.
For smaller and mid-sized advertisers, he added, a simple workflow provides access to “that new category of that audience”.
21.7 million Australian gamers are up for grabs
The timing of the launch comes as gaming now reaches 3.6 billion people globally and, according to figures cited by Khabra, there are 21.7 million players in Australia alone, playing for roughly eight and a half hours each week.
Crucially, he said, gaming is no longer a niche channel dominated by one age group or gender.
“It’s across everything from Gen A to Boomers,” Khabra said.
“And I think that that’s really telling because it means that a marketer or an advertiser could leverage gaming to connect with their entire consumer base.”
That audience could include “someone older who’s playing”, an everyday PlayStation user or a hyper-casual mobile gamer, he added. “Female and male is 50-50 as well.”
“Every single advertiser has a consumer that’s playing video games,” Khabra argued.
“It’s a targeted audience and an environment that is capturing ad budgets off other channels like CTV.”
So what will the ads actually look like?
At launch, Ads by Livewire will offer two formats initially, with more planned for next year.
These will be in-game billboards and interstitial banners.
That could mean a brand’s creative appearing naturally on a billboard as players race through a game, while other formats can appear as full-screen interstitials during gameplay.
Livewire is also giving advertisers the ability to preview how their creative will appear in a gaming environment before committing to the campaign — meaning that Canva design can be visualised as an actual ad before it goes live.
Khabra said the company is particularly focused on ensuring ads work with, rather than against, the gaming experience.
“Some of those ads, like the in-game billboards, are integrated seamlessly,” he said.
“We’re really focused on being non-intrusive, making sure the user has a positive experience, and then making sure that the marketer is showing up in a really authentic way.”
That is particularly important as brands enter environments where realism can be part of the appeal.
Khabra pointed to racing games as an example, where billboards already exist in the environment but may be filled with fictional brands created simply to make the game world feel more realistic.
Ads by Livewire creates the opportunity to replace those fictional spaces with actual advertising from recognisable brands.
And according to Khabra, that could enhance rather than interrupt the experience.
“I think the question was, is there too many ads in a game or is it breaking the user experience?” he said.
“But actually it’s not, it’s adding to the user experience.”
Why Canva?
With 265 million users worldwide, Canva gives Livewire immediate access to an enormous community of marketers and businesses already creating campaign assets on the platform.
But Khabra said the decision was also about workflow.
“What we’re innovating now is the ability for a user to start in a tool that they’re using now for marketing, which is a creative tool, and then remain within Canva, and then be able to push that creative into a game,” he said.
“And then you get reporting back of how that campaign is running. And that’s a single workflow.”
Rather than forcing marketers to create assets in one place, move them into another platform and then navigate a separate buying process, the integration keeps everything in one environment.
Khabra compares the experience directly with the familiar world of social advertising.
“If you’ve ever used Facebook Ad Manager, it’s very simple to use. It’s based on credit card, you pick your audiences, you pick your flight dates, and you go live,” he said.
“And really, that’s the same workflow that we’re bringing to market.”
The partnership was also a natural fit, according to Khabra, because Livewire and Canva already had an existing relationship and had continued to develop ideas together.
“The alignment felt right. Felt like it was the right partnership,” he said.
“It’s great to see two Australian companies come together and innovate.”
Canva is only the first ‘front door’
While Canva is Livewire‘s first integration, it will not be the last.
Khabra revealed the company has plans for up to 10 other “front doors” into its operating system, potentially allowing users of other major platforms to access the same workflow in the future.
“Canva’s the first, but not the last,” he told B&T. “We have others with very large user bases that we’re looking to bring our operating system to.”
