Tesla advertising is its best shot to escape Elon Musk’s toxic brand

Elon Musk made a shocking admission this week.

“There are amazing features and functionality about Telsas that people just don’t know about,” he told the attendees of Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting during the Q&A portion. “And although, obviously a lot of people follow the Tesla account or my account on Twitter, to some degree it is preaching to the choir, and the choir is already convinced . . . so we’ll try a little advertising and see how it goes.”

Despite sounding like your aunt debating the merits of buying a Facebook ad for her dried flowers Etsy store instead of the CEO of a $550 billion market cap corporation competing against some of the highest-profile and most-iconic brands and product marketers in the world, this was a major step for Musk, who has vocally panned the need for advertising his car company since its founding in 2003. 

There are more than a few reasons why Tesla should be considering advertising. The maturing EV market means that brand differentiation must now go beyond, “Hey, it’s electric!” It’s no longer an outlier. Most electric cars have adopted such signature Tesla features as a large touchscreen display and rapid acceleration from 0 to 60. The EV market has grown to the point where it’s not enough to be the cool, new shiny bauble among a gaggle of century-old combustion engine relics. 

Tesla has grown at an incredible rate and created massive amounts of wealth for its shareholders, all primarily on the back of Musk’s personal promotion and his own brand image. But EVs are increasingly mainstream, and Tesla’s promises of being more than just a car company increasingly ring hollow. (The latest is Musk hyping humanoid robots as the company’s true future.) Given some of Tesla’s self-inflicted woes—multiple recalls, including more than 1 million cars in China; and yet to deliver on bold self-driving claims, among others—Tesla, like it or not, is being judged more and more as a car company. And car companies are major advertisers. The company’s biggest brand challenge remains that the power that got it to where it is—Musk—also happens to be the most significant barrier in getting it where it needs to go.

Informative and entertaining

There’s never been an official Tesla TV commercial. One analyst’s estimate of its entire annual marketing budget wouldn’t cover the catering cost for the commercial shoots of its rivals. Meanwhile, Ford spent $370 million on advertising last year, Toyota hit $1.1 billion, and General Motors spent $1.35 billion.

Why should Musk consider changing his advertising strategy now? 

Tesla’s falling U.S. EV-market share, which has dropped from 72% to 54% since January 2022, leaps to mind. Some analysts predict that it will shrink even further in the next few months.

Then there is yet another, more complicated reason. Musk could afford to be contemptuous of advertising . . . until last October when he purchased Twitter, which despite his many (often poorly thought-out) attempts to create alternative revenue streams, remains almost completely dependent on advertising. If one needs to convince advertisers that you’re a worthy partner, that task may be more challenging when you keep trashing the value of, well, advertising.

Major brands are already plugging their nose to work with him, as last month’s leaked emails among marketing execs made clear. Musk himself said on Tuesday, “Twitter is highly dependent on advertising, so, here I am, never used advertising really before, and now have a company that’s highly dependent on advertising. So, I guess I should say, ‘Advertising is awesome, everyone should do it!’”

Musk added that if advertising is informative and entertaining, “it can start to approach content,” clarifying that ads need to be “informative” and “ideally, aesthetically pleasing.”

Let’s just take a quick second to acknowledge that what Musk is saying here is something just about every one of the nearly 300,000 people who work in the U.S. advertising industry would’ve heard as, “Water is wet.” Yet here is Musk, as if descended from the mountaintop, pontificating about something everyone already knows. It would be like tapping LeBron on the shoulder during Saturday’s game and telling him he should probably try to score more points if he wants to beat the Denver Nuggets.

One problem with Musk’s “revelation” is that his recent ideas of what is informative and entertaining may not exactly translate to a broader audience. A day before the shareholders’ meeting, Musk used his brand voice to suggest that George Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization” and that he “hates humanity,” before invoking an anti-Semitic trope and comparing him to Marvel villain Magneto. Soros’ family office fund had recently sold its shares in Tesla. When asked by NBC News about his comments, Musk replied, “I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of doing that is losing money, so be it.”

This is not the kind of brand-building Tesla needs. (Or SpaceX. Or Twitter.)

Look no further

Despite the ad industry’s constant navel-gazing and frequent self-flagellation, the best advertising on the planet still consistently emerges from ad agencies. Steve Jobs and Apple had Lee Clow and TBWA/Chiat/Day. Nike has Wieden+Kennedy. But as a creative partner, Musk doesn’t exactly come across as the collaborative type. So far, Tesla’s brand story has been told through his own voice, which also happens to include woefully wrong public predictions about COVID-19, restoring banned Twitter accounts while overseeing an unprecedented rise in hate speech on the platform, and, well, hating advertising.

Musk needn’t look far for examples of this creative brand content concept that he says is the high standard he seeks. Car marketers are perhaps the world’s best at turning advertising into entertainment. BMW Films pioneered modern brand entertainment before Tesla’s founding, and it was resurrected this very week in time for the carmaker’s newest short film to debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2020, Ford marked the return of the Bronco by teaming with Disney and Oscar-winning director Jimmy Chin to create three films that became a primetime media event across the Disney networks ABC, ESPN, and National Geographic. 

Let’s not forget Volvo’s 2014 “Epic Split,” which introduced Jean-Claude Van Damme to a whole new generation, and became one of the most-viewed ads of all-time by getting almost 50 million views in less than two weeks. Volkswagen’s 2011 Super Bowl ad, “The Force,” achieved similar numbers, and forever changed how brands launched big game ads.

The perils of being in business with Elon Musk

Any potential ad agency partners for Tesla know that as a CEO-centric company, which has made virtually no investment in the brand beyond Musk’s own hype and product launches, Tesla’s brand certainly carries the baggage he brings. One agency exec I spoke to this week, on background, told me that if most agencies looked at their list of clients, they’d have to look hard to find any saints. But the majority of those clients aren’t public figures. Agencies have their own brand to think about, and given Musk’s public—and constant—cultural presence, this exec believed most agencies would take a brand image hit from working with him.

You can imagine a scenario where Tesla hires, say, Venables Bell & Partners, based on that agency’s successful 15-year run with Audi. Let’s say VBP creates a great campaign platform that performs fantastically across social, in the Super Bowl, on TikTok—everywhere. There is no guarantee that at the same time, Musk will be over on Twitter, finding another way to rail against anti-white racism, work-from-home, and the woke mind virus. Tesla’s brand work, no matter how brilliantly conceived and executed, would be competing for attention against his public personality.

Even if that didn’t happen, there’s still a very real risk that Musk would just take all the credit à la Coinbase and its attention-getting Super Bowl ad from February 2022.

Despite all of that, when I asked the same agency exec what they’d do if Musk called their agency, the answer was, they’d treat Musk and Tesla like any other prospective client: Meet, talk about values and goals to see how they align, then have a healthy internal debate about it. That debate would surely include the CFO, given the details of Musk strategically not paying his bills that have emerged from a suit against Musk and Twitter by former employees. That’s how powerful a draw defining the clean slate of Tesla would be for any agency.

Minimum Effort

One did not have to wait long after Musk’s offhanded suggestion about advertising to see all the problems any agency would face in taking on the Tesla account.

One day, in fact. On May 17, a Tesla fan uploaded a deepfaked ad featuring an AI version of Ryan Reynolds stumping for the car brand with gems like, “How much do you think it would cost to own a car that’s this f**king awesome?” Basically the kind of f-bomb-laced, nuance-less copy that Reynolds would never say, but that Musk might find entertaining. Which he apparently did, replying, “Nice.”

Then Reynolds’ agency, Maximum Effort—founded on the idea of the power of fun, creative, and timely advertising—responded by the next day with its own deepfake, this time with Musk and Reynolds-owned Aviation Gin. To which Reynolds himself, of course, reacted with a one-word reply: “Nice.”

It perfectly encapsulates the gulf between the two as marketers. Musk talks about entertaining and engaging advertising as a novel concept he just thought up, while Reynolds has been among the best to do it for years now. 

Another key difference is that while Musk is inarguably one of the most innovative business leaders of our time, he’s not a movie star. Reynolds has the charisma to balance putting himself out front for his brands, including Aviation, Mint Mobile, and fintech firm Nuvei, while making sure it’s all in service to the brands themselves. For the latter, in April, Reynolds used the opportunity to poke a certain type of billionaire.

What Musk should learn from Steve Jobs but probably won’t

The focus of Musk’s advertising comments this week was on features and functionality, which is not typically the foundation of great brand building. Back in 1997, Steve Jobs talked about how even the best brands need investment and caring in order to retain their relevance and vitality. But the way to do that wasn’t to talk about speeds and feeds, or why Apple was better than Windows. He said the question they asked themselves was, “Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world?” He said that Apple’s core value is, “We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”

Since then, Apple has been among the world’s best marketers in how it’s evolved its advertising to be creative, entertaining, and informative, with award-winning work like “Shot on iPhone,” or its 2013 holiday ad that managed to be both tearjerker and product demo. 

Who is Tesla and what does it stand for? What is it really selling right now? These are the questions that any Tesla advertising will need to answer for those not already singing in the Musk choir, all while praying Musk isn’t simultaneously belting out an entirely different tune.