The Difference Between Localization and Local Insight: Canva’s Secret Sauce for Success
Canva's Robyn Pettitt on Why Localization Isn't Enough
Most companies think they’ve “gone international” when they’ve translated their campaigns. But Canva’s Localisation Centre of Excellence Lead, Robyn Pettitt, speaking at Weglot’s International Marketing Summit, begs to differ.
At Canva, every paid ad is fully localized: the copy, the imagery, the music, the people on screen. It’s the most expensive content they produce, handled by creative agencies rather than translation vendors. By most standards, it looks like best-in-class international marketing. “It needs to look and feel the most local,” Robyn explained.
But if you ask Robyn, she thinks it still isn’t enough.
The problem isn’t the asset; it’s the brief. Every global campaign, no matter how well adapted, originates from English-language data and English-market insights. That creates a category of errors that no amount of translation or visual swapping can fix:
You might be pushing photo editing in a market where that feature is already saturated, while a collaboration gap goes unaddressed (and would be a missed opportunity for your company to challenge competitors)
You might be running Meta ads in a market that is knee-deep in TikTok
You might be targeting SMB owners – but only because that’s who your English data tells you to target, when the actual majority of users in that market are students, teachers, or enterprise workers
This is where the Canva team realized they had to make an important distinction: localization is adapting an asset for a market (the sky is blue, water is wet). But local insight is understanding what that market actually needs.
The first is a production problem. The second is a strategy problem, and this isn’t something that can be resolved from your desk.
“Users will forgive certain things when they already love your brand.” Robyn continued. “But if it doesn’t look and feel completely local, you lose potential customers before they’ve gotten to try your product.”
Canva saw an early opportunity to redirect their resources. This part of the funnel proved too hard to crack, and instead of pressing on, they decided to hand paid marketing ownership entirely to local growth teams in priority markets. Not just execution, but all of it: the brief, the budget, the channel strategy. Because if the insight has to come from the market, so does the mandate.
So this is what any company building an international marketing program should know: translation is a starting point, but it’s far from being the destination. The question that will make a tangible difference in your strategy isn’t “have we localized this?” but “does this campaign reflect what we actually know about this market?” Those are very different questions.