Tesla backtracks on ad strategy with cuts to its marketing team

Tesla’s marketing and advertising team was included in “ongoing layoffs” the EV maker has made in recent weeks, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Wait—Tesla had a marketing team? Recently, the famously ad-adverse company had begun testing advertising efforts after CEO Elon Musk told shareholders last year that the company would “try out a little advertising and see how it goes.”

Since then, Tesla has run campaigns on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X; last week, the company disclosed that it spent about $200,000 on the Musk-run app.

• Tesla spent about $6.4 million on digital advertisements in the US last year, a “dramatic increase” from the $175,000 it spent the year before, according to estimates from MediaRadar, the Wall Street Journal reported.
• That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the automotive sector, which spent an estimated $20.8 billion last year, according to the World Advertising Research Center.

Today, Tesla’s ad strategy appears DOA, as this week’s layoffs included the company’s new “growth content” team, which, since it started up four months ago, had hired about 40 employees. Tesla still has a small marketing team in Europe, Bloomberg reported.

Responding to news of the layoffs, Musk tweeted that Tesla’s “ads were far too generic—could have been any car.”

Last week, facing lower sales figures, production issues, and a decline in car deliveries, Tesla said it would cut more than 10% of its global workforce, Reuters reported. The company’s stock fell on Monday and is down “more than 40% this year,” per Bloomberg.