Horrible designs come to life and sing a woeful song about their longing for a Canva upgrade. The attention-magnet campaign, aptly named Envy-Inducing Canva Designs, is DEPT®’s first for Canva, since being appointed as Canva’s lead agency on the Netherlands in August. It is also Canva’s first Dutch campaign.

The song is a rewrite of the Dutch classic Ik wou dat ik jou was (I Wish I Were You) by Veldhuis & Kemper. The designs craving attention are humorously cringe-worthy – a wedding card in clashing fonts, a social post missing out on likes, a frustrated clip-art light bulb in a business presentation, a badly cropped cat poster…and whatever this is:

Behind the humour is the truth that the Dutch enjoy creating things themselves, but that isn’t always accompanied by expertise. Canva positions itself as the tool to help self-made creations masterly, with the tagline, “You make it, with Canva.”

The campaign film was directed by Yousef Thami and produced by 100 prcnt. The full campaign covers linear TV, cinema, social and OOH and follows Canvas’ equally hyper-local launches in Italy, France, the US, the UK and Thailand.

Pol Hoenderboom, executive creative director at DEPT®, stated, “The Dutch love to create things, but they’ve been using the same Word template and the cringy PowerPoint slides for years. Telling them that felt a bit rude, so we decided to rewrite a Dutch classic and let the ugly designs sing it instead. It turns out making something truly ugly takes a lot of craft.”