On March 7, 2024, at Canva Create in Los Angeles, the Australian design giant unveiled its latest product updates through an unexpected medium: a six-minute hip-hop musical starring CEO Melanie Perkins and a cast of employees in colonial-era waistcoats. Within 48 hours, clips of the performance had racked up millions of views across X, TikTok, and LinkedIn — and the comment sections were at war.
Dubbed everything from "the most unhinged B2B marketing moment of 2024" to "surprisingly brilliant," the routine has become a Rorschach test for how we evaluate corporate creativity. But beneath the hot takes lies a genuinely interesting question: In an era where every brand is desperate to "go viral," does all attention actually help the bottom line?
Here's how to make sense of the chaos.
What Actually Happened
Canva's performance wasn't a tossed-off skit. It was a fully staged number — complete with Hamilton-inspired rapid-fire verses tracing the company's founding, synchronized choreography, and lyrics touting Canva's AI-powered design tools and user-friendly interface. Perkins, worth an estimated $3.6 billion, rapped front and center. The audience of roughly 3,500 creators, marketers, and developers watched live; the internet watched afterward.
The Hamilton comparison wasn't accidental. The staging borrowed heavily from Lin-Manuel Miranda's aesthetic: period costumes mixed with contemporary movement, dense lyrical storytelling, and a diverse ensemble cast. For a company born in Perth that now competes with Adobe, the symbolism was transparent — Canva sees itself as the disruptive upstart rewriting an industry's rules.
You can watch the full performance on Canva's official YouTube channel, though the most circulated clips came from audience members and marketing commentators on X.
Interpretation 1: The Earned Media Math Checks Out
If Canva's goal was raw attention, the stunt paid for itself several times over.
By Monday morning, the performance had generated coverage in Adweek, Marketing Brew, and dozens of tech newsletters. Marketing professors were assigning it in classrooms. Meme accounts were slicing it into reaction content. The hashtag #CanvaRap trended intermittently across three days.
This is the earned media jackpot that B2B brands typically spend millions chasing and rarely achieve. Consider the alternative: Canva could have delivered a conventional keynote — slides, product demos, sober executive interviews — and earned a fraction of the conversation. Instead, they bought cultural relevance at the cost of... some embarrassment?
Even negative engagement feeds the algorithm. Every "this is cringe" quote-tweet expanded the reach. In viral economics, indifference is the only true failure. Canva provoked exactly zero indifference.
Interpretation 2: The Authenticity Problem
Attention isn't the same thing as persuasion. And for some observers, the performance crystallized everything exhausting about corporate attempts at "relatability."
The core critique goes like this: A $26 billion platform whose leadership team is overwhelmingly white and wealthy performing a hip-hop musical about their own success story feels less like creative risk-taking and more like costume play. The colonial waistcoats, in particular, struck many viewers as a bizarre aesthetic choice — evoking Hamilton without grasping why Miranda's reimagining of American history actually mattered culturally.
"The issue isn't that a tech company did a rap," noted one viral LinkedIn post from a brand strategist. "The issue is that they mistook format for point of view. There's no perspective here, no tension, no story beyond 'we're great and our tools are easy.'"
This matters because Canva's brand has long traded on accessibility and democratization. Its tagline, "Empowering the world to design," promises to put professional creative tools in everyone's hands. A self-congratulatory musical starring the billionaire founder risks undercutting that positioning — replacing user-centricity with executive-centricity.
Interpretation 3: The Audience-Product Mismatch
Perhaps the most overlooked question: Who was this actually for?
Canva Create's live audience skews toward professional designers, marketers, and content creators — people who use the platform daily and are already sold on its value. For them, the stunt may have landed as a fun, memorable break from the typical SaaS conference slog. Several attendees posted genuinely enthusiastic reactions from the room.
But the viral clips reached a far broader and more skeptical audience: casual social media users, design professionals loyal to Adobe, and cultural commentators primed to mock corporate performances. These viewers had no existing relationship with Canva, no context for the event, and no patience for B2B inside baseball. To them, the performance read as pure absurdity.
This creates a strategic tension. If the goal
