Sports

From countertops to electric cars: Spain is back at the Super Bowl

Madrid, Feb 11 (EFE).- Seventeen years ago, marble countertop company Cosentino became the first Spanish company to advertise at the world’s biggest sports showcase, the Super Bowl.

On Sunday, electric car charger company Wallbox will continue that legacy, investing an estimated 3.5 million dollars for a 15-second TV slot, which could prove key in its race to become a sector leader in the United States.

The finale of the American football season, which will pit the Los Angeles Rams against the Cincinnati Bengals, attracts close to 100 million Americans every year and makes every second of advertising worth gold.

This year, it is estimated that each 30-second slot of NBC advertising will cost a record 7 million dollars.

In the ad, the company will tell the story of Seth Thomas, who survived a lightning strike and is able to overcome his fear of electricity to use Wallbox’s charger for his electric car.

Unlike other Super Bowl advertising campaigns, the Catalan company has chosen to give the leading role to an average person rather than a famous athlete or celebrity.

“He is a person who has experienced a very peculiar real situation,” Wallbox’s marketing director, Bárbara Calixto, tells Efe.

“We believe that with him we can tell a story that has a sense of humor and is very relatable to our product.

“We chose someone like you and me, who has experienced something real, because our consumers are real people,” she says.

The Super Bowl is Wallbox’s latest stop on a lightning-quick journey that has seen them sell their chargers in 40 countries and manufacturing both in Barcelona and China a mere five years after being founded in 2015.

Last year, Wallbox made the leap to the US market and in October they went public on the New York Stock Exchange, valued at $1.5 billion.

“The reason we’re at the Super Bowl is because our potential consumers are there,” Calixto says.

“It’s the world’s most-watched televised sporting event, but it obviously has more in the United States, where more than 50% of households watched the game last year. That is our market,” she adds.

The growing supply of electric cars and the American government’s planned investments to stimulate the vehicles make the US a fundamental market for the Catalan company.

“An investment of this amount has to make strategic sense, you cannot invest so many resources if that does not translate into advancing the business,” she says.

“In our case, the United States is a key market, where we are listed on the stock exchange and in which we have a very well-positioned product for residential recharging.

“We believe that it will open up opportunities for us”, says the executive of a company that is returning Spain to the biggest sporting and television event of the US calendar. EFE

Mam/ta/ks

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