1 / 10
/// The Brand Foundation
The ethos
A celebration of teachers. Not the product. The people.
The voice
Quirky, warm, human. Never corporate. Never stale.
The permission
007 themes. Beach vacations. Circuses. All on-brand.
The mascot
A panda. For no reason. Teachers loved it.
Teachers and administrators are quirky people at heart. Sometimes quirkier than the rest of us. The Canvas brand was built around that truth — speaking to educators not just as professionals, but as humans with outside interests, weird obsessions, and genuine personalities.
This wasn't a stale enterprise software brand. It was something that could live and breathe in the world. User events took on completely different themes year over year — because the brand gave us permission to do that. The underlying ethos held everything together, even when the execution looked nothing like what came before.
And the brand permeated everything — customer success interactions, sales outreach to schools, how reps showed up at conferences. All of it done with high intentionality, all of it rooted in the same foundation: this is about people, not the product. Almost never about the product.
That foundation is what made a campaign like LevelUp possible.
/// The Campaign
Blackboard dominated the LMS market — but institutions were frustrated and ready to make a move. Instead of a generic demand gen push, we built a gamified ABM campaign that made switching feel like winning. And because the brand was already playful, nothing felt forced.
1 / 10
/// What It Produced
$15M+
New enterprise pipeline generated from targeted Blackboard accounts
High
Engagement across target institutions — digital, direct mail, events
Accelerated
Sales conversations with competitor accounts already in evaluation
Aligned
Marketing and enterprise sales moving from the same playbook