By Ed Avis
All of the TV ads for Capital One’s business credit card are approximately the same: Some business owner used the cash-back feature to buy something else for the business, and so on. But one Capital One ad that started running during the NBA playoffs in April hit home for the Mexican restaurant industry. It featured Jorge Gaviria, founder of Masienda, a company that supplies heirloom Mexican-grown corn for making masa.
“Someone from Capital One reached out to me in 2019 or 2020 and wanted to know if we had any good experiences with the card that were different,” Gaviria says. “We had redeemed about $40,000 of rewards to finance our new Molinito corn mill, which grew into a million-dollar business. They loved that angle and felt it was something that would relate to the entrepreneurial community.”
In 2021, film makers spent three days with Gaviria shooting the commercial. They collaborated on the script so that Gaviria could promote the Molinito, which is a tabletop molino for grinding nixtamalized corn into masa, while highlighting the benefit of using the Capital One Spark Cash Plus Card.
“It was fun,” Gaviria remembers about the filming. “I got to work with a large professional commercial team. I live in LA and I’m very interested in the entertainment industry, so to be part of that was a cool experience.”
About two years later the ad hit the airwaves and Gaviria immediately noticed a jump in business.
“The Molinito is meant for a very specific group. There’s a bit of a ceiling in so far as how many people are grinding corn into masa on a daily basis, but the ad has driven traffic to our site and increased sales for the other products,” he says. “Our masa sales are through the roof right now; they’re at or higher than holiday 2022 levels.”
Want to watch the ad? Click here.