Canva has switched on Ads by Livewire, letting marketers design and buy in-game mobile advertising from inside Canva with campaigns starting at A$500. It drops the last barrier that kept in-game a specialist buy, and it is another step in Canva becoming a media-buying platform, not just a design tool.
The Take: Canva just made buying an ad inside a mobile game about as simple as booking a boosted post, and that removes the last barrier that kept in-game advertising a specialist buy. The opportunity is genuine reach in a channel most Australian media plans still ignore. The risk is spending on attention you have not thought through, in an environment you do not understand, because the button is finally easy to press.
The launch: On Tuesday night Canva switched on Ads by Livewire, letting marketers design and buy in-game advertising across mobile games from inside Canva with campaigns starting at A$500. Livewire is an Australia-founded gametech firm led by former Dentsu ANZ programmatic lead Indy Khabra, and it handles the buying, delivery and optimisation while the marketer sets budget, audience and creative. It is the first gaming app in Canva's marketplace, sitting next to Canva Grow, which already runs paid social across Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn.
The price: In-game inventory used to move through bespoke deals and publisher-by-publisher negotiation, which priced out anyone without an ad operations team. A A$500 floor and a design tool marketers already know changes who can play. For scale, Australian internet advertising reached A$19.8 billion in FY26 on IAB Australia's numbers, and the same body found 19% of local ad buyers planned to lift in-game spend this year.
The new floor to run an in-game campaign through Canva, down from the bespoke ad operations deals that used to gate the channel
The bigger play: This is less about gaming and more about Canva. Design was the front door. Media buying is the room it opens onto. Every tool that owns the creative step wants the media budget that follows, and Canva now touches social, search-adjacent formats and games from one login. Sit with that. The design tool your team opens every day is quietly turning into a media-buying platform.
For Australian operators: Treat the easy button with the discipline you give any channel. Gaming reach is real, and Livewire's own research claims Gen Z and millennials spend 28% more time gaming than watching TV. A cheap entry point is not a strategy. Start with a small test budget. Insist on real reach and outcome reporting rather than raw impressions. Match the format to the game before you scale it. Keep an eye on how much of your stack one vendor now holds, because owning both your creative and your media buying is convenient until it is not.