Avon's 'The Last Make-Up,' created by Havas Tribu in Costa Rica in February 2019, aired during El Clásico to confront violence against women during soccer
ARCHIVEAvon and Havas Turn Costa Rica's Biggest Soccer Match Into a Stand Against Violence
Avon's 'The Last Make-Up' is a 2019 film campaign created by Havas Tribu in Costa Rica that aired during El Clásico — the country's most-followed seasonal soccer match between Saprissa and Alajuelense — to draw direct attention to the rise in violence against women during and after national football fixtures.
Published in February 2019, the campaign positions Avon as a purpose-led beauty brand prepared to use one of Costa Rica's highest-profile media moments to confront a public safety crisis rather than sell product. The creative decision to place a women's rights message inside a sporting event associated with elevated incidents of domestic violence is the campaign's defining structural move. By choosing El Clásico as its broadcast vehicle, Avon and Havas Tribu ensured that the message reached the precise audience — and the precise cultural moment — most implicated in the behaviour the campaign sought to address.
In Costa Rica, reports of violence against women increased during and after national soccer matches, according to data cited in the campaign's own editorial context as documented on adsoftheworld.com. The campaign aligns with the broader #NiUnaMenos movement, a Latin American women's rights rallying point that had grown significantly in public visibility across the region in the years preceding the campaign's launch. By connecting Avon's beauty heritage — specifically the symbolism of make-up — with the reality of women experiencing violence, 'The Last Make-Up' reframes cosmetics as evidence of harm rather than as aspiration, a creative inversion that gives the campaign its emotional force. The single film asset constitutes the entire media package, concentrating impact into one precisely placed broadcast moment in the Costa Rica market.
Avon identified a documented behavioural pattern in the Costa Rica market as the foundation for its strategic brief. Reports of violence against women increased during and after national soccer matches, according to information cited by adsoftheworld.com in its coverage of the campaign, making El Clásico between Saprissa and Alajuelense not merely a large audience opportunity but a contextually charged placement with direct relevance to the campaign's subject matter.
The strategic rationale operates on two levels simultaneously. On the audience level, El Clásico delivers the broadest possible reach within Costa Rica during a single broadcast window, maximising the probability that the message meets the people most likely to witness or perpetrate gender-based violence in the hours surrounding the match. On the brand level, Avon uses the campaign to advance a purpose positioning that distinguishes it from direct beauty competitors. In the global cosmetics market, rivals including L'Oréal and Estée Lauder have built significant purpose-adjacent campaigns, but neither has anchored a women's rights message so specifically to a documented national crisis in a single market with this degree of contextual precision.
The #NiUnaMenos hashtag situates 'The Last Make-Up' within an established Latin American feminist movement that carries its own pre-existing audience and emotional credibility. Avon's association with that movement is not incidental — the brand has maintained a long-running commitment to ending violence against women as part of its global corporate purpose platform, as documented on Avon and avonworldwide.com. That lineage gives Havas Tribu a genuine strategic foundation from which to build rather than borrowing social currency opportunistically. In 2019, Avon's prior campaign work, including the 2016 empowerment-focused 'This Is Boss Life' documented on adsoftheworld.com, had already established the brand's appetite for purpose-driven creative, making 'The Last Make-Up' a coherent next step in that evolution across the Costa Rica market and beyond.
ARCHIVEHavas Tribu, operating from San José, Costa Rica, built the entire creative argument of 'The Last Make-Up' around a single and deliberately uncomfortable visual inversion: make-up, the product category Avon exists to sell, reframed as physical evidence of violence against women. The film format allows that reframing to unfold over time, giving the creative team space to establish emotional recognition before delivering its central statement.
The campaign's production is led by a named creative team documented on adsoftheworld.com and adruby.com. Chief Creative Officer Javier Urbaneja oversaw the work, with Creative Direction by Joshua Rueda Mego. Art direction is credited to Mauricio Mejía, and media strategy — including the pivotal placement decision within El Clásico — to Media Director Gaby Navas. The specificity of that media placement reflects a creative and strategic alignment that is visible in the credits: the decision to run a single film asset during Costa Rica's most-watched match is itself a creative act, not merely a media buy.
The film's construction depends on the audience's familiarity with make-up as a cosmetic ritual to generate its emotional disruption. When that ritual is connected to violence rather than beauty, the campaign forces a recontextualisation in real time. This technique is particularly effective in a broadcast environment where viewers are not seeking advertising engagement — a sporting audience during El Clásico in Costa Rica is among the least receptive to conventional beauty advertising, which makes the campaign's subject matter all the more arresting when it arrives. The #NiUnaMenos framing adds a layer of collective identity, connecting an individual viewer's response to a movement larger than any single brand or broadcast moment, and lending the film a social life beyond its original airing.
No verified performance data for 'The Last Make-Up' is publicly available in the form of independently audited reach figures, conversion metrics, or post-campaign research results. Campaign documentation on adsoftheworld.com associates the work with social media response connected to the #NiUnaMenos movement, but specific engagement numbers have not been independently confirmed and are therefore not reproduced here.
What structural analysis does make clear is that the campaign's effectiveness model is not built around conventional beauty advertising metrics. Avon and Havas Tribu designed 'The Last Make-Up' for a single, high-stakes broadcast placement in Costa Rica rather than for sustained media investment across multiple channels. Its measure of success is better understood as cultural penetration — whether the film altered the public conversation around gender-based violence in the context of football — than as product-purchase intent or brand-recall lift.
The decision to air during El Clásico, Costa Rica's highest-viewership soccer fixture, demonstrates a deliberate prioritisation of moment over media weight. One precisely chosen placement in front of a fully engaged national audience carries different strategic logic from a fragmented multi-platform campaign. For a single film asset carrying a serious social message tied to the #NiUnaMenos movement, that logic is defensible and arguably appropriate to the creative ambition of the work.
Clapboard rates 'The Last Make-Up' at 64 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine strategic coherence and the credibility of its contextual placement, while acknowledging that a single film asset with no documented performance data limits the evidence base for a higher rating. The creative inversion at the heart of the work is distinctive and purposeful, and the Havas Tribu team's decision to anchor a women's rights message inside Costa Rica's most culturally charged sporting broadcast remains one of the more structurally intelligent media choices in the campaign's category and year.
'The Last Make-Up' is a 2019 Avon film campaign created by Havas Tribu in Costa Rica. It reframes make-up as evidence of violence against women, airing during El Clásico — the country's most-watched soccer match — to confront the documented rise in domestic violence during national football fixtures.
Reports of violence against women increased during and after national soccer matches in Costa Rica, according to adsoftheworld.com. Placing the campaign inside El Clásico between Saprissa and Alajuelense ensured the message reached the largest possible national audience at the culturally specific moment most relevant to the campaign's subject matter.
Havas Tribu, based in San José, Costa Rica, created the campaign. The team included Chief Creative Officer Javier Urbaneja, Creative Director Joshua Rueda Mego, Art Director Mauricio Mejía, and Media Director Gaby Navas, as documented on adsoftheworld.com and adruby.com.
'The Last Make-Up' uses the #NiUnaMenos hashtag to situate Avon's 2019 Costa Rica campaign within an established Latin American feminist movement. The connection lends the film collective identity and social reach beyond its original broadcast, aligning Avon's purpose positioning with a pre-existing and credible regional women's rights platform.
Clapboard rates 'The Last Make-Up' at 64 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic coherence and contextually precise media placement during El Clásico in Costa Rica, while noting that a single film asset and the absence of verified performance data limit the evidence base for a higher rating.
Avon's purpose-driven creative history includes the 2016 'This Is Boss Life' campaign documented on adsoftheworld.com, which framed empowerment through economic independence. 'The Last Make-Up' extends that lineage by connecting Avon's global commitment to ending violence against women — documented on avonworldwide.com — to a specific, documented crisis in the Costa Rica market.
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