About Fast Company

Fast Company⁠(opens in a new tab or window) is the world’s leading business media brand, sitting at the intersection of technological innovation, leadership, world changing ideas, creativity, and design.

Founded in 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, Fast Company magazine was established to chronicle the changing face of business. The two former Harvard Business Review editors set out to showcase individuals, teams and business practices that were disrupting industries and changing the world.

Over the last three decades, the company has gone from a print magazine with a launch distribution of 100,000 to a global multimedia brand. But, the media world has changed since when Fast Company launched at the height of the dot-com boom. No longer can publishing companies rely solely on selling print advertising slots — a different landscape calls for different monetization and marketing strategies.

Today, the company has a diverse portfolio of revenue streams, from subscriptions, e-learning and events to integrated marketing campaigns, with a readership of more than 3 million.

The challenge

As Fast Company’s Vice President of Marketing, Damian Slattery has witnessed a shift in the way publishers work with advertisers. The power dynamic has changed, and the relationship is far more collaborative than ever before. This presents unique challenges to marketing teams, as well as a plethora of opportunities.

Gone are the days of pitch deck presentations that take months to plan and deliver. Clients expect polished and beautifully designed proposals from publishers, delivered quickly to their inboxes. “The pace is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” says Damian. “Clients expect our work to be thoughtful, creative, beautiful and fast.”

The rise of remote work has only accelerated these expectations. The proliferation of digital communication tools have made speedy response times a given. “These days, there’s no reason you can’t be faster,” says Damian. “The only limiting factor, of course, is that there are only a certain number of hours in a day.”

Unfortunately, speed hasn’t always been compatible with Fast Company’s collaborative and iterative workflow. “It’s always been a back-and-forth process,” says Shannon Pashcow, Associate Director of Integrated Marketing. “I’d get on a call with our sales rep, talk about what he wants, and then get to work designing it, laying out the story. Then I’d send it back to him, and a day later he’d give me notes.”

For Fast Company’s marketing team, sacrificing quality and creativity was never an option. However, there was no denying that their time-consuming workflow and feedback process had become a bottleneck.

The solution

Fast Company needed a design tool just as innovative as they are. They found it in Canva Teams⁠(opens in a new tab or window), which they use as an all-in-one marketing, communication and design solution.

Creating quality at speed with templates

One of the first things Fast Company did on Canva Teams was set up branded templates for presentations, pitch decks and marketing videos. This meant they no longer had to reinvent the wheel each time they presented a new idea, concept or campaign to a client. With a repeatable process at their fingertips, they were able to serve up quality at speed. “They arm you with the ability to have your output match your input in brilliance and uniqueness,” says Damian.

Better collaboration, with less effort

For marketing teams like Fast Company, there’s often a long chain of approvals before assets even make it to the client. Then, clients have feedback, leading to multiple versions of design files.

Canva’s suite of collaboration tools⁠(opens in a new tab or window) means teams and clients can communicate, assign tasks, and manage files and projects in one centralized place. ”With Canva, once you’ve created a design, you can share that URL with someone else and make edits together in real time,” says Canva Chief Marketing Officer, Zach Kitschke.

Ensuring brand consistency in a few simple clicks

In a competitive media landscape, having access to consistent visual assets is essential for the success of any integrated marketing campaign. This involves delivering a unified message across multiple channels.

Canva Teams is the creativity tool⁠(opens in a new tab or window) that allows the Fast Company team to set up brand kits for each of their clients, with fonts, colors and approved templates. This means they can quickly design consistent and professional-looking designs for any of their client’s marketing channels — whether it’s an email header, video thumbnail or Instagram Story.

It also empowers non-designers to create professional designs, without any experience needed. With Canva templates, a copywriter can drag-and-drop images and text to create social media assets or a sales associate can whip up a slick video presentation in minutes.