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Comment by pmcollins | Hacker News Reader

How Tesla Spends $0 on Advertising:

https://www.themarketingish.com/newsletter/tesla-advertising

Saying a company that literally sent a car into space has a zero dollar advertising budget is just a combination of Hollywood accounting and delusion.

And this is how we know article has not been read

Very early in the article

> To clarify before we begin, advertising and marketing are not the same thing. According to the American Marketing Association marketing is “the process of identifying customer needs and determining how to best meet those needs.” In contrast, “advertising is the exercise of promoting a company and its products or services through paid channels.” Yes, Tesla does spend money on marketing albeit significantly less than the competition. For instance, in 2015 Tesla spent $58.3 million on marketing when competitors like BMW spent $196.6 million.

They needed to put mass into space, might as well make it funny

How can you compare these absolute numbers? In 2015 BMW had 25 times more revenue than Tesla, and only spend 4 times as much as Tesla on marketing. So in relative terms Tesla is spending way more

I assume they are long $TSLA. In my experience, they pick whatever comparison is convenient for their narrative. Absolute in cases such as this and relative for growth numbers.

Marketing seems to be largely not correlated with revenue/sales, besides things like buying the badges to put on cars.

Source?

I should say marketing expenses minus advertising - There's a base price you must spend on marketing, eg. tesla.com could be seen as a marketing expense since it's the final selling point before someone puts down a reservation fee, along with the obvious "every car needs the T emblems which cost $0.90 per car".

My point is that Tesla can achieve the same revenue levels without necessitating a 4x increase in marketing spend.

Tesla didn't send a car into space. SpaceX did. And since SpaceX needed to send something on the new Falcon Heavy's test flight, and nobody was willing to trust an actual satellite or space probe to it, I wonder how you could even place a budget on it. It was just a glorified mass simulator.

Tesla is the one that supplied the VIN 686 roadster (~109k opportunity cost) but enormously benefitted from the marketing and social media crazy of launching a car into space and having a website dedicated to tracking it (they don't even pay to run this; lucky TSLA) https://www.whereisroadster.com/

You mean Musk -- the vehicle's private owner and user -- personally supplied it?

Musk's personal roadster was VIN 1, so while the rumors are that this was his daily driver Roadster (which would make sense since it looks like a 2.0 with 2.5 stuff in it), it came free from Tesla either way.

So he had multiple of them, cool. It was his personal property when he donated it for the purpose. So no Tesla involvement was necessary. Not quite sure how it's relevant how he'd previously acquired it unless Tesla commanded him to use it in a specific way.

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