The vision of two women is behind the advertising of recognized Cuban brands such as the Mandao home delivery app or Parranda beer.
Mayvic Delgado and Disley Alfonso arrived in Havana in 2013. The first one left Cienfuegos to study art history at the University of Havana through a career change. The second came from Matanzas. She desired to train as a social communicator in the capital, although she did not want to leave her native province at all.
Life made them coincide and become friends. They shared several work projects until in September 2019 Mayvic decided to found MadWoman, then a digital marketing venture.
Disley did not follow her at the beginning but finally joined a few months later. The apartment that both shared in the Centro Habana municipality was the first headquarters of what is now DM Creativas, an enterprise in operation since 2023 under the category “Specialized Design Activities” that maintains the commercial name MadWoman.
Almost five years later, the story of Mayvic, who had to sleep at the bus terminal on her first day in Havana, and Disley, who missed her Matanzas family when she enrolled in the Havana University Faculty of Communication, has changed a great deal.
They went from starting a business dependent on digital connectivity, affected by a context of uncertainty in a Cuba that had just premiered Internet access on mobile devices, to lead a private enterprise, which has gained prestige in the emerging advertising sector in the country.
Dreaming with Coca-Cola
“We want to be the advertising agency that Coca-Cola chooses when it decides to get to Cuba.” Thus Mayvic Delgado, CEO of MadWoman and its creative director, summarizes the enterprise’s vision.
However, to reach that high standard they must overcome several obstacles. First, the constitution of their enterprise itself as an advertising agency.
The new Social Communication Law, approved in May 2023 in Parliament, but still not published in the Gaceta Oficial, does not recognize private advertising agencies, only the state agencies and independent creators, attached to the Cuban Association of Social Communicators (ACCS) or the Audiovisual and Cinematographic Creator Registry.
Parliament approves first Law on Social Communication in Cuba
For now, MadWoman is a creative group that produces graphic and audiovisual materials whose ultimate goal is to promote brand values, products and services, mainly on the Internet. Given the context, their raison d’être places them at a crossroads.
Not being able to act as an advertising agency directly impacts the relationship they establish with their clients and other counterparts, such as state media themselves, which have already opened to advertising, even though the Communication Law has not yet come into force.
“We cannot represent our customers when they want to place advertising materials in the media,” said Disley, head of business strategy.
Alfonso considered that the Social Communication Law has a very centered vision of the media and leaves other actors out, not only the “private agencies,” but also the content creators or influencers.
Advertising, a bad word
In Cuba, advertising agencies ceased their activity after the triumph of the Revolution, being nationalized or abandoned by their owners, and the media eliminated commercial advertisements in March 1961.
The late Mirta Muñiz, a prominent publicist since the 1950s, a renowned professor, stated in an interview in 2017 that, after 1959, advertising in Cuba has been considered by some as a bad word.
“When the blockade against Cuba began, there was a lack of products and demand was greater than supply, so it was understood that advertising was unnecessary and almost completely eliminated. The school and the advertising agencies disappeared, and we advertisers practically had to dedicate ourselves to journalism to survive,” she said in another interview.
Since then and for more than thirty years, advertising has been a forgotten topic in the country, which was only taken up again in 1992, with the development of tourism, as designers Flor de Lis López and Ernesto Borges explain in an academic article.
The crisis of the 1990s motivated an economic opening. State and joint advertising agencies were created, then primarily aimed at promoting tourism and foreign investment, which coexist with independent creative groups. Completely foreign companies also arrived in the Cuban market.
“The resurgence of advertising in the 1990s responded to temporary issues and once the scenario changed, its maintenance as a valid tool in our social system was not encouraged,” the authors explain.
With the opening of self-employment in 2010, private businesses resorted to different promotional actions to stand out among the competition. The variations of formats ranged from flyers, posters and small spots in the well-known “Weekly Package.”
Since then, these actions have been described by the most conservative as remnants of capitalism that are returning.
For Mirta Muñiz, the main challenge was to make it understood that advertising is not an exclusive instrument of capitalism. In her opinion, this is an idea that persists in many people, sometimes due to ignorance.
“I would say to anyone who is skeptical of advertising work that they always must and have to think about the recipient of the messages. Don’t forget that we are consumers, just like any citizen from anywhere in the world,” Muñiz, who worked for the Coca-Cola transnational, said then.
The Social Communication Law qualifies advertising in Cuba as a form of communicative production, for commercial purposes, which must respect “the historical and cultural identity of the Cuban people,” safeguard “the values of socialist society” and promote “inclusion, as well as national interests and the different economic actors.”
The regulation also authorizes radio, television, news agencies and print and digital media, all state-owned, to insert advertising in “correspondence with their editorial profile and form of economic management,” only after receiving approval from the new Institute of Information and Social Communication, formerly the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT).
According to the law, publications aimed at girls, boys and teenagers continue to be prohibited from including commercial advertisements.
These definitions were arrived at after years of debate on drafts of the law, which had more than thirty versions before being unanimously approved by Parliament.
Prior to this legislation, only a select group of media could include advertising, such as the economic weekly Opciones by Juventud Rebelde publishers, the classified publication Ofertas by the Agencia Cubana de Noticias news agency, Cubavisión Internacional or Radio Taíno.
The Cuba that is advertised
Seven years ago, Mirta Muñiz stressed that most Cuban products lacked good advertising.
Two years after that interview, in 2019, Mayvic Delgado founded MadWoman to create quality communication products for Cuban clients.
“When we started, the thought that brands had to build value, transmit messages, and connect with people was not widespread. I had this concern that as a society we would consume visually modern, renewed products because almost everything that existed then had many shortcomings,” she told OnCuba.
Mayvic and Disley attribute their success today to the fact that they have always prioritized aesthetic quality and have known how to understand international patterns to adapt them to the Cuban context. “We are very demanding of ourselves and that attitude has led us to grow,” they confessed.
Among their greatest results is having accompanied Mandao, the popular home delivery app, since its emergence, which was their first client and with which they developed their first promotional campaign with influencers for almost six months in 2020.
Likewise, the launch in the summer of 2023 of Parranda beer was highlighted, a brand they manage after winning a public tender.
In addition, they faced a trial by fire when they had to handle crisis communication for this client when at the beginning of the year there were reports that some batches of the drink were spoiled.
During this time, in which they have offered services to other recognized brands such as Home Deli and El Gelato, the MadWoman team has seen how difficult it is to create amid the economic crisis in Cuba.
“When launching Parranda, the product was only available in MLC (freely convertible currency). Brand promotion was complicated because they wanted to open up to the national market and be the most economical beer. However, developing communication for them under these conditions was complex,” said Disley.
“Cuba has an aging population, but there is a very low percentage of this segment that can be represented enjoying a certain product or experience. How many seniors can afford an ice cream from El Gelato? That is a reality,” commented Mayvic, for her part.
“One of the biggest challenges we have is social representation in the designs and audiovisuals we create, due to the notable differences that exist within society,” explained the CEO.
Unstoppable
The name MadWoman is inspired by the U.S. television series “Mad Men,” whose protagonist is the advertising agency Sterling Cooper. “Internationally, advertising is a man’s world; well, here we are going to be women,” said Mayvic. The structure of the enterprise echoes that of Sterling Cooper, which also resembles those of the 1950s in Cuba.
However, Disley Alfonso, head of strategy at MadWoman, stated that keeping the workforce covered has been a challenge amid the increase in emigration and the consequent exodus of qualified professionals.
It is also not easy to operate in the sector when there are technological limitations with Internet platforms blocked for Cuba, she explained.
Alfonso, a communicator who is quite meticulous with information, regrets that there is little data on the Cuban market and that, for example, ratings cannot be obtained for radio advertisements.
Another challenge they face is when the monetary value of their services is sometimes not understood. In the opinion of both, there is still a lot of business culture missing to understand the value of this work and all the creative processes behind an advertisement.
However, in a country where advertising has historically been viewed with skepticism, the MadWoman team, led by Mayvic and Disley, challenges perceptions and proves that private advertising agencies deserve to exist.
“What we do is not as significant anywhere else as it is here, because of our desire to generate value, to build a successful project,” Mayvic acknowledged, adding: “You cannot be afraid. You have to believe in yourself. If you want to contribute to Cuba and you have the knowledge to do so, let nothing stop you.”
