B-to-B Dream Team 2025: Meet Jimmy Knowles -

Event Marketer’s 2025 B-to-B Dream has been unveiled. Each month, we’re sitting down with one of our all-stars to talk trends, best practices and all things uniquely b-to-b.

Jimmy Knowles, Global Head of Experiential, Canva

When Jimmy Knowles landed his first job, it was like a scene plucked straight out of a movie. As senior class president at Ithaca College, Knowles was charged with finding a commencement speaker, and ultimately selected Amy Kule, who served as group vice president at Macy’s and managed tentpole events like the Thanksgiving Day Parade and 4th of July Fireworks Show. The duo got to talking during breakfast on the morning of the ceremony, and when Kule finally took the stage, she didn’t just deliver a speech—she offered Knowles a job in front 11,000 people. It was an opportunity that would go on to influence the entire trajectory of his career.

And thus, Knowles’ event marketing journey began. He accepted the position as an associate producer of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, something he refers to as his first “toe-dip” into experiential at a time when the discipline was still essentially in its infancy. From there, he had a stint as a junior publicist at Fox working on the network’s Upfronts. It was in that role that he met Ryan Seacrest (yes, that Ryan Seacrest), who had just acquired a major stake in Civic Entertainment Group, where Knowles then went on to work for the next decade.

He worked primarily on the Airbnb account at Civic, helping execute events like Airbnb House at the Sundance Film Festival, Airbnb Park at SXSW and the colossal Airbnb Open event for platform hosts. But as many event profs do, Knowles eventually found himself moving from the agency side of the biz to the brand side, and the timing couldn’t have been better. He had just moved out of his New York City apartment and was looking for his next big venture when a friend from Airbnb who had moved to Canva called to offer him a role as the first-ever global head of experiential at the company.

As the first person to hold the position, Knowles had both the freedom to pave his own path, and the momentous undertaking of building the first-ever Canva Create user conference, now the brand’s flagship event.

“It was just an incredibly exciting opportunity to build a team, build a practice from the ground up,” Knowles says. “For my first six to eight months, I was a team of one, which was challenging. And that first six months was spent building our first-ever Canva Create, which would quickly evolve into our largest tentpole. Now I’m so excited to say we are a team of nine folks, and we’re all stretched across every corner of the globe.”

Since its launch in 2022, Canva Create has quickly evolved into a festival of creativity that serves as the largest event in the Aussie brand’s portfolio, which last year spanned 30-plus events. The first two iterations were hosted in Sydney, where the company is headquartered, followed by a move to the U.S. for the 2024 show, which was opened up to an external audience for the first time. In 2025, Create was again hosted in the States, which Canva views as something of a halfway point between its London- and Sydney-based locations.

Fun Fact: After Canva showed up at Miami’s Possible conference with a “Canva Creative Juices” bar featuring fresh pressed juices with quirky names, the hospitality concept caught on at a host of its other events. Later this year, the brand will be canning and labeling a real-deal, custom beverage called Canva Creative Juices, inspired by flavors native to Australia and designed to enhance creative thinking.

Along the way, Knowles says that brand leadership has enabled the event’s continued growth and evolution by giving his team “the space to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, an opportunity to get messy and creative,” which aligns well with one of Canva’s seven core values: “Set crazy big goals and make them happen.”

That experimental, innovative spirit is infused into the whole of Canva’s events. For Knowles, it’s all about delivering joyful, personalized experiences and touchpoints that create emotional connections between attendees and the brand in unconventional ways. And with multiple key audiences to speak to, from marketers to school teachers and students to chief experience officers, Canva relies heavily on experiential marketing to meaningfully engage those groups.

“You kind of have to walk and chew gum at the same time and find different ways to speak to each of those audiences without changing your identity or your voice or who you are and always being uniquely you, which I think is the most valuable lesson that I’ve learned over the past three and a half years,” says Knowles. “When you show up authentically and organically, that resonates with the audience, and people see that and recognize that.”

Looking ahead, Knowles says he aims to do more testing and learning around how to broaden the definition of what “experiential” truly encompasses by leaning into experimentation. He adds that the team will continue to approach events in a way that is “very human and really grounded in Canva’s unique identity,” whether the audience is business- or consumer-facing.

“We are not a typical tech brand; it’s not about clean lines and smooth surfaces and hard edges,” he explains. “It’s rounded corners and it’s coloring outside of the lines and we have rubber duckies that float across the screen and the product… It’s very experimental, very fun, very whimsical. And I really do feel like I have my dream job every day because I get to do so much cool, fun, creative work for a brand that I really believe is walking the walk and talking the talk.”