It's All Elon's Fault
Modern marketing is about change. Without the will to do new things when nothing is so completely broken so as to require it, your marketing and content will always end up failing.
It’s Tuesday! Robert here - and I’ve just finished the first episode of the Bon Jovi documentary. What a snooze-fest.
I hope your week is off to a better start.
So, tell me you don’t know anything about marketing without telling me you don’t know anything about marketing.
I was screaming that at my computer screen last week as news broke that multibillionaire and “marketing genius” Elon Musk fired Tesla’s content and marketing team one year after he begrudgingly said he would, you know, “try a little advertising and see how it goes”.
But here’s the thing - all the media outlets are getting it wrong.
The “news” that they are reporting is focused on the angle that 40 people in marketing got dismissed and that they were all new. Most of the marketing mags and blogs are reporting that this team was only one year into their tenure, and that Elon went out of his way to say that their advertising work was “average”.
But, see, while Elon did go out of his way to throw shade. The team wasn’t new to the job, nor average in their work.
Okay - hold on, I’ll come back to that… Speaking of awesome work (see what I did there I’m segueing)… before we move on…
<cue awesome car dealership music>
Here at TCA We’ve been rolling up our sleeves and working with clients on a fractional basis. We can not only help you roadmap your approach, but let us know if you need an addition to your content marketing team to get some you know what done.
<Turns off the car dealer music!>
Okay… Let’s get back to it…. In this week’s edition.
Don’t let the lack of change, change you.
You can now use AI in Facebook and Instagram - but should you?
Let’s roll….
ZOOM LENS: NO CHANGE GETS YOU NOWHERE
So - back to Elon.
Though most news reports say the 40-person team had only been around a year, my reading says the employees had been around a lot longer than that. The leader of the group there - Alex Ingram posted a lovely exit post on LinkedIn. He mentions the group has been doing the work in comms, public relations, and social media since 2019. It was Elon’s begrudging acquiescence to change to “try a little paid advertising” that was a year old.
So, here’s a comms team that had been doing interesting, creative things for five years, with no change. Then, comes a passive aggressive mandate to “try advertising”. It didn’t work out. So Tesla got rid of the team. Doesn’t that make perfect sense?
Now, that’s not the annoying part. As most marketer’s would recognize - a mercurial CEO changing their mind is Tuesday.
Rather, what’s most annoying is that Elon felt the need to go out of his way to throw this team under the bus when it’s assuredly NOT their fault. If you want to hear me rant more about this - it’s here.
Selling Change Is Hardest When Things “Aren’t That Bad”
So - when Elon issued this mandate a year ago - things were decidedly better for Tesla than they are today. And I get that selling in change like a new content strategy, or a new innovative marketing operation can be hard to push through.
When a company’s strategy is suboptimal but not so broken as to undermine success, the anticipated pain of changing feels greater than the pain that might (or might not) arise if nothing changes.
It’s a Catch-22. No one wants to throw out the existing approach to a new, smart, strategy even if they recognize it might be better.. Why? Because the way it’s working now is the way it’s worked for years. And people rightfully question whether any reinvention will prove as amazing as promised.
So - what can we do?
Well, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my 30 years of marketing it’s this:
Doing nothing new rarely leads to success.
New what?
New ways of engaging audiences. New stories to move them and earn their trust. New reasons for them to engage with you again. New something.
You and your team always have the power to develop these new maps. It’s a choice. You can continue to fix only those things in such disrepair as to qualify for demolition. Or you can look for things that could be better and try a new way of doing them.
You might fail. Or you might not. Either way, you’ll have a new perspective on what to try next. Even if that new thing is a finding a new job because you’re CEO is an immature ass.
You can see a longer version of this article here.
Have an awesome week.
WIDE ANGLE LENS: MARKETING SNAPS
Let’s get it all in frame. Shall we?
💰 $300 Million - The amount of fixed costs (mostly marketing and engineering) slashed by General Motors in the first quarter. It helped them make the quarter. Let’s see how it pays off in the long run.
👎 Because we can - So Meta has announced that it’s new chatbot is available in Instagram and Facebook. you can generate images and GIFs, asks for summaries of text, and even generate answers. With this new “feature” I just can’t get this GIF out of my head…
LENS FLARE: - TCA Events & Happenings For You
We’ve got a great new webinar for May
Join us on May 30th for our monthly webinar series - and this one should be fun. We’re going to talk about all the research we’ve been doing on the use cases for Generative AI in marketing - and how categorizing them properly is the first step to making sure you’re deploying a solution that will actually meet your leadership’s expectation. Come register today.
Did you miss our April Webinar
We had a great turn out for our Social Media Strategy Webinar. So, if you missed it - check out the on-demand version.
LENS CAP: Let’s Finish With A Flourish
Maybe the most troublesome thing about Elon’s action are the leadership teams across the industry who paid attention to his actions of tearing down Twitter to its studs and thought “that looks like a good idea”. There is a less than zero chance that many leadership teams hear Elon’s dismissal of content and marketing and, as they did in Twitter’s dismantling, say, “Maybe we should do that too.”
Spoiler alert for those leaders: Don’t. Tesla always considered marketing and branding as an afterthought. Its noted absence is not laudable but one of the myriad symptoms of challenges the car company has. There are no lessons to be learned here for any leadership team other than what not to do.
And to the former content growth team at Tesla, bon voyage. Your work was fantastic. Your fellow marketing and communications practitioners are with you. You will all end up in a better place.
See you next week!