No! I found out about it through a placement at Columbia University.
As for the recall questions and much else. Until the advent of large scale Internet search much of the advertising industry ignored 'direct marketing', as it was known then because it was labor intensive, processing intensive and...above all...cheap. Advertising agencies made maoneyy creating advertising and placing ads. They did print ads, even aided local newpaspaer placements and billboards, but those were much less lucrative.
I learned most of my craft in those advertising days and they were wondrous. Big budgets, fancy locations and focus groups plus all kinds of metrics to justify all that.
Tomes change, now very precise internet placements are the huge money spinners.
Companies like Tesla manage to capture social media and search as well as anyone can.
Your father and I were of a different world. To be sure, the big budgets still exist as well as carefully designed metrics that measure everything other than direct sales results, because advertising actually cannot quite manage to tie cause and effect so precisely.
internet, social media, and direct targeting can and does have those metrics. Their weakness is that people who do not understand them mostly don't realize they're happening and often don't actually believe them. That is the dilemma that makes people want advertising, so they can see their own pitch themselves on TV. Sadly, that wastes money.
I come from the marketing attribution world, and one of my former clients is an auto manufacturer with a global marketing budget in the billions of dollars. With the more recent theoretical developments in this field such as market response model and hierarchical Bayes, and with the availability of internet data, both marketing consulting shops and in-house marketing teams have been developing marketing mix models and multi-touch attribution models with increasing accuracy and business impact.
To make the story short, advertising in the auto industry accounts for around 15% of sales in the US market, with ROAS in the single digits. Some marketing channels are more efficient than others. I remember that spot TV was actually the most efficient marketing channel, for both dealership-driven advertising and brand-driven advertising. Paid Search was up there too. The numbers are a bit misleading from a financial point of view because return on ad spend was measured on unit sales and revenue rather than profit because the marketing department's job was to increase sales, not profit, an example of how a big company often has teams that don't align on the same goals. That said, with some extrapolation from the financial reports, I estimated that advertising was a net positive for their bottom line, at least in the US market. ROAS was trending down, however, as the auto market was becoming more and more saturated in the years before Covid.
Unfortunately, I left that world before Tesla exploded, so I never had a chance to study the impact of advertising on EV sales, even though my team started preparing for an EV model launch for our client. Their production numbers were small anyway, and we'd have to use number of orders to approximate sales.
I suspect that traditional paid advertising is still relevant, though it needs to be more data-driven. The average US adult still spends hours a day on TV, on average. People use mental shortcuts more often than they should. When it comes to buying a new vehicle, they often think of what they have been regularly and recently exposed to. An ad campaign that is well pulsed will stay on the audience's mind longer and influences the top-of-mind consideration. They know that the local Toyota is running a financing deal or that Ford has this 2023 vehicle with powerful features, and they know how much these vehicles cost. They may have seen Teslas in their neighborhood but they assume the vehicles are out of reach for them price-wise, not being aware of the recent price reductions. There are people who make purchases based on the ads they are frequently exposed to. Younger demographics trust their Instagram influencers, and older demographics trust the TV ads they see.
I don't know how effective advertising for EVs would be, but the only way to know is to experiment. I don't know why Tesla has never experimented with paid advertising, and I don't think any poster on this forum knows either - all we can do is speculate. My guess is that Tesla is going to start experimenting with paid advertising this year amidst the slowdown in demand and the quick ramp-up in production. They have the scale to make advertising work, and if it doesn't, cut the losses and move on. From a business standpoint, reducing prices is the last-resort option to drive sales. Constantly cutting prices is a much worrisome sign of lack of financial discipline than experimenting with paid advertising.
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