The Cantabrian Lucía Casanueva (Santander, 1975) decided to found her company, PROA Comunicación, in 2008, at the height of the Lehman Brothers collapse. The critical situation that arose did not deter her because the businesswoman, who is also a mountaineer and is used to climbing, wanted to take on the challenge. "I decided to set up my project when I reached the base camp of Manaslu, which is an 8,000 in Nepal, and I thought that if I had been able to do that, that you have to have a bit of courage, I could also be an entrepreneur. The result of that challenge more than 15 years later is an agency with a staff of 20 professionals and which appears in the ranking of the hundred best communication consultancies in Spain published by El Publicista.
Casanueva decided to embark on a solo career after years of professional experience working in Germany and the UK, as well as in Spain, in leading multinationals in the sector such as LLYC, Kreab and Edelman. Already with the PROA brand, one of his main milestones was the management of the crisis communication of the train accident in Santiago de Compostela in 2013. "That was a crisis communication case that was very complex in the first instance, because there were many victims and it required very intense work during the summer months," she says.
His client portfolio also includes brands such as Lacoste, Artá Capital and Mercapital. He also advised the Spanish construction company OHL when it decided to take a stake in the capital of Inmobiliaria Colonial, a highly publicised operation in the midst of the real estate crisis. His activity is closely linked to business news, which is why in recent years he has also been taking on communication projects linked to the defence sector. "I think it is an area in which we have to do a great job of educating different audiences," he explains in response to the question of how to approach the image of a sector that has traditionally been so reviled in our country.
In this way, Casanueva - who in 2015 decided to join forces with another partner, Valvanuz Serna, also from Santander, to run PROA - anticipated the boom in communication agencies with the arrival of social networks, which led to an "overpopulation of the sector". Casanueva herself acknowledges this and predicts that "as in other areas, there will be movements of concentration". Regarding the use of artificial intelligence, she acknowledges that it has been used in her company "for a long time" because "trying to fight against AI is like trying to plough in the sea and it allows us to be more productive". However, he stresses that "it will be a driver, but the human factor can never be absent, you will always need a person to help you design your corporate story well. Communication is no longer something optional, it is something necessary, you can't let someone else tell your story for you". As a communication expert and a Cantabrian, Casanueva defends the slogan 'infinite Cantabria'. "It sums it up well because it is truly infinite, it has everything and it is just a stone's throw away," she says.
Although he acknowledges that it lacks better communications. "I live mainly in Madrid but whenever I can I escape to Santander and I think that this community really needs a faster train and competitive air fares because what this region sells is totally aspirational and many people would love to live here". Although she confesses that she is part of the "exodus of people who have had to develop their professional careers abroad" because her work makes it impossible for her not to live in the capital, she does not believe that being from Cantabria has been a handicap, on the contrary, "it is a privilege".