Canva Report Suggests In-House Asset Creation Could Halve Agency Spend

In-house asset creation could halve agency spend, according to a report commissioned by global graphic design unicorn, Canva.

​The Total Economic Impact report, produced by Forrester, studied the cost savings and business benefits enabled by Canva Enterprise, finding that supporting in-house asset creation led to a “decreased agency spend of 50%”.

The report also found Canva Enterprise drove a 300% increase in marketer productivity for asset creation, 75% reduction in production-level design requests for designers, and 30% increase in business-user productivity.

To meet demand, marketing teams face the choice of hiring more in-house designers or outsourcing to production agencies, both of which are “costly and not scalable” solutions.

“Heavy reliance on external agencies for creative production resulted in lengthy onboarding, brand governance, and significant dollar spend,” the report reads.

“With high agency costs and slow turnaround, outsourcing design work limited the number of assets that could be produced.”

One team lead in the financial services sector said their organisation paid an external agency $400 per social media post, limiting the content the company could produce for its social channels.

“Agencies are now focused on strategy and big ideas, not the repetitive stuff,” the respondent said, after implementing the Canva Enterprise into their workflow.

“That’s a huge shift for us. We’re not using agencies for production work anymore. We still use them for high-concept campaigns. But the day-to-day … is all in-house now.

“Agency spend went from $500,000 to $300,000 over 18 months, and we ended our contract with one production vendor.”

Canva’s head of B2B marketing, Emma Robinson, told LBB the findings don’t indicate a “race to the bottom”, “because speed on its own isn’t the goal, relevance is.”

“Canva helps teams produce more content, but more importantly, it helps them test, localise, and iterate faster,” she explained.

“That means brands can tailor their creative for different audiences, languages, and channels, rather than relying on a single generic execution. With Canva Grow, creation, publishing, and performance happen in one flow.

“Teams can design ads, launch across platforms like Meta, track results, and quickly iterate based on what the data is telling them, all without switching tools. Over time, the platform surfaces smarter recommendations about which formats, messages, or visuals tend to resonate, so teams are not guessing and improve with every campaign. That is the shift from generic generative AI to practical impact.”

Emma cited financial platform Stripe as an example of a company using Canva to scale digital advertising.

“Using Canva, they were able to generate localised variations for dozens of markets in the time it previously took to produce a single English-language asset. We consistently hear from customers that this leads to stronger engagement and better performance, because the creative is closer to the audience it’s designed for.”

She added the growth of in-house advertising isn’t necessarily uprooting existing agency dynamics.

“High-volume production is increasingly handled in-house, but agencies remain central for core strategic ideation and creative direction,” Emma said, noting the shift means agencies can focus more on higher-impact work, while in-house teams use Canva to amplify, scale, and adapt assets across channels.

“What we’re seeing isn’t a race to the bottom on fees, but a rebalancing of where agencies add value,” she added.

Emma also stressed this “high-impact” work can include things like developing templates and brand systems.

“What’s changed is that designers are spending less time on repetitive tasks like resizing or recreating assets for different formats, and more time defining visual systems, creative rules, and brand expression at scale,” she said. “AI plays a key role here.”

With Canva, non-designers can generate polished, fully editable content in seconds, Emma added, “without starting from scratch.”

“That foundation makes it possible to scale to dozens or even hundreds of on-brand outputs, without experienced designers needing to touch every single file.

“The result is a shift in the designer’s role within the organisation, from gatekeeper to force multiplier. Teams can move faster, creativity scales, and creative leaders get consistency without becoming a bottleneck.”

While the full Canva suite is an upfront investment, Emma said this is the cost intrinsic to any creative system.

“The difference is that once those foundations are in place, Canva dramatically reduces the ongoing cost of production,” she said.

“It works when brand is built into the system, not enforced after the fact. Marketing and creative teams set the guardrails -- brand templates, locked elements, approved assets–– and every team can create confidently within them. This is exactly why Canva is built around brand control, not just content creation. It means empowering non-designers without sacrificing consistency.”