Effectiveness beats efficiency. Creativity is the multiplier. And we are here to build businesses, not brand awareness.

Dolan started in banking, very briefly, before realising he wanted a more creative environment, timing it with the growth of programmatic and the digitisation of media. He spent the best part of a decade and a half in agencies, running media planning, buying and creative teams, building early machine learning and data science teams for Group M, and a consultancy for young brands covering media, creative and product optimisation. He then went platform side, setting up and owning marketing science across APAC, leading creative effectiveness across the Middle East and APAC, and heading customer solutions with responsibility for the technical product. Now at Canva, he describes his background as a marketing scientist first and a failed creative second.

Spend enough time with data and you become one of two people: someone who entrenches in it with a narrow outlook, or someone who starts to see the emergent power of creativity. It is hard to measure and subjective, but it is the multiplier in outcomes. Having analysed millions of campaigns, Dolan sees the intersection where data-led planning combines with real creativity. His big learning: good execution is invisible, the creative is the product, and the job is to add creativity and entertainment to people's lives.

The foundations stay the same; the context changes. A decade ago celebrity brands were tequila and makeup; now the new celebrity brand is agencies, because they built their livelihoods off being connected to culture. The real change is a move from the custodianship of the advertising industry to people who live and breathe culture. Democratization changes the approach: tools once assumed technical capability and needed intent, now Canva provides the capability, so it is about your vision. Getting the technical out of the way lets people focus on connecting with culture and consumers.

The creative that works best is never the one you expect. After labelling thousands and then millions of creatives, Dolan found the winners were never what he predicted, so he keeps an open mind and reminds himself he is never the target. The second lesson is to be wary of short-term metrics, which optimise for next month but erode long-term value. Being creative compounds, and the long-term payoff is always bigger for the business.

Holding the course is hard, and Dolan says a lot of it comes down to how marketers communicate. The industry talks in input metrics, awareness, mental market share, conversion, engagement, which the business does not fundamentally care about. The way through is building better relationships with CFOs, finance teams and CEOs, and positioning long-term decisions in metrics that matter to the business. The goal is not lifting awareness but building companies.

The creator economy is a democratization of attention and entertainment. The primetime moment is now individual and happens at any point in the day, driven by the people you are most connected to, an interest-based messenger effect. Brands have to get comfortable letting others tell their story after a century of control. But Dolan warns of a creator cliff: as creators grow and diversify into bigger partnerships they can lose the connection that made them valuable, and brands should not contribute to their alienation.

The next stage is less dogmatism about where and how stories are built, and more focus on the best story possible. A lot of it is about humanity: some of the best storytellers for a brand are its own people, because they live and breathe it. Budget should flow to wherever the story can be told best, through the person best placed to tell it. And partnerships are won and lost on the brief; remove distinctive brand assets and the product story and you are just making content, not advertising.

Canva's positioning, 'Anyone can with Canva,' reflects a belief that everyone is creative and has something to communicate. The purpose is to democratize that, to pull potential out of people and remove the gatekeeping once attached to strong visual communication. The peak moment is when someone turns an idea into something without needing professional support, and the business is built around that.

With content demand exploding, Dolan starts with the brand at the core; Canva is built around a brand kit so creative stays consistent at scale. Content has to come from many places, not just expensive ads, because almost any part of a business is creative. The product exists to produce large volumes of on-brand, consistently creative work that feels good to make. In the AI world, the aim is tools that bring the thing in your head to life fast, getting the technical out of the way so people can focus on being creative.

Dolan's headline conviction is effectiveness over efficiency. An obsession with efficiency, in advertising or inside the AI industry, tends to make a business smaller, and it dominates the conversation because it is easier to measure: hours saved, volume produced. Effectiveness asks what is actually produced and delivered, whether volume, response or profitability. The AI industry is already moving away from pure efficiency toward what it empowers, and that is where growth will come.

AI is very broad to implement, and the big learning is unlocking real outcomes as easily as possible. Working with an LLM means multi-shotting, iterating around a starting point, so the tools that win are the ones that work first time and keep people focused on the outcome, not the tool. Canva's Magic Layers is his example: it decomposes an image and lets you move things around with a click, avoiding the stochastic parrot process of going round and round.

Every AI feature in Canva is built on human insight. It is strongest at solving the starting point, like blank page bias, and getting the tool out of your way, but it should improve what a person is doing, not replace them. Dolan invokes the Betty Crocker egg: a mix you just added water to failed, but adding an egg made it a best-seller, because people fundamentally care about things they create. The aim is to make people feel they are still building the thing, just in a way that feels like magic.

Building brands in the AI era is a battle always being fought, but the principles hold: broad reach, creativity, distinct brand assets. The risk is that new tools compound the efficiency problem. Dolan's exemplar is the Lawgora AI ad with Jude Law as the new face of Law, a 60-second spot you want to watch, communicating a technical product with emotion. It is B2B but B2C coded, a reminder that every decision maker is still a person, so marketing is really business to people.

For the next generation, Dolan backs expertise built on passion and being T-shaped. He used to tell his teams to be the second-best opinion on anything in the room, because that makes them the most valuable. Overspecialisation is dead, but general teams give general work, so focus on the craft. Above all, keep learning: much of what he does now he learned in the last two or three years, and the trap is believing you have learned everything, when something new always comes from the most unexpected places.