- Within about a week of the unveiling,
Tesla sold over 250,000 of their new Cybertrucks.
The one that looks like it's made for Mars
because it, kind of, is.
Now, this is, kind of, nuts.
And Elon gave us the mix of which versions
they even sold.
And if that is correct, at 250,000 Cybertrucks sold,
with that percentage of each different one,
you're looking at over $14 billion in revenue.
And they did all of this without any marketing, whatsoever.
Or did they?
Let's free the data.
(upbeat music)
Tesla is an anomaly when it comes to car companies.
A lot of car companies spend a ton of money on advertising
to get the word out abour their products.
Tesla does not spend any money on advertising.
And when Elon says that, he's not lying, that's true.
However, it doesn't mean that they don't market
their products and have a good marketing strategy.
If you look online, you'll find all sorts of websites,
Instagram accounts and, obviously, YouTube channels,
like this one, that use their name
and some even use their logo, in their branding.
This is borderline trademark infringement,
maybe not that borderline, actually.
For example, if I created a YouTube channel
called, "I like Toyota."
And used their logo, font and color pallette.
Chances are that id get a letter from their legal team
asking me to stop.
Now, this makes sense and it actually happened to me once
with a parody video I did, of Morgan Freeman,
reading the Tesla Model 3, driving manual.
And they sent me a cease and desist,
I took it down.
Funny side note, maybe that's a different video.
But the point is, companies don't want you parading around
online, or really anywhere, as their representative,
as someone that actually speaks for them, as the company.
Whether that's because they have a different way
they wanna deliver their marketing message
or just because they don't wanna get anything mixed up
and have you do something that they don't like.
Whatever the case is, companies generally don't let you
and try to stop you from using their trademark,
their logo, their name et cetera.
Now, this isn't the same thing as fair use,
where I or anyone that is publishing things online
are free to talk about a thing from a criticism standpoint
or a commentary, whatever the case may be.
We can use those items and those resources
when talking about those companies,
to explain what we're talking about.
This is considered, fair use.
This is how the news can show the Chevy logo
when they're talking about a recall or something.
Now, pause for a second, I'm not a lawyer,
this is not legal advise, okay,
fair use is a very complicated subject
and the FTC actually releases tons of guidelines
for people like me, influencers, creators
whatever you wanna call us,
on how to actually go about, fair use
and when it's okay and when it's not.
But what it all comes down to,
is a lawyer and judges are the ones that decide
what is and what is not fair use.
But essentially, those are the two sides.
You can use a companies logo, trademark, images, et cetera.
But not in, to parading around as them,
but more as in commentary, explanations, about them
et cetera, et cetera.
But if you notice, Tesla really seem to care when people
use their name, their logo, anything else.
And, I think it's because these folks are basically
doing Tesla's marketing job for them.
And so Tesla doesn't seem to do any of that.
They don't have a giant legal team that tracking down
anyone with the name Tesla in their Instagram account
or anything.
Because it doesn't make sense for them.
They have other bigger fish to fry.
And yes, I realize the irony here of me talking about
it with a channel that uses their name, at least in part.
We're all apart of the big machine,
really when it comes down to it.
No how does this work for Tesla though?
How does it play out? How does it benefit them?
Well the Cybertruck event is a perfect example.
Tesla invited lots of social media folks to the event,
as well as main stream media that also were invited.
There were many Youtubers, and primarily Youtubers is who
I found there at the event.
And many of us own Tesla's so we got in as guests,
but a lot of us also were invited as media
Now I love this because this shows a company like Tesla is
embracing the internet culture.
The folks like myself and many others that put in a lot
of our energy, our time, and our money into making content
because we love the company, the products, the industry,
the path that we're all on.
Whatever the case may be, we are real people doing this
for you, the audience.
Versus the mainstream media, which have been around forever
and have all kinds of different motivations
behind what they do.
So, with the Cybertruck event the question is;
How much attention did it really get them?
Obviously, the mainstream media would be covering them;
but how much extra just on YouTube did this one event
get them by inviting all of us?
Now, if you want to guess I would be very curious to hear
if you guys can figure it out.
Go comment down below before the video continues,
and tell me how many views you think Tesla got
from the Cybertruck event.
And then we'll jump back and see how it
lined up with my research.
Well, it's kind of hard to track this down
there have been hundreds, if not thousands upon thousands
of videos that are about the Tesla Cybertruck.
So, what I did is use the lovely YouTube data API
to run a search query for anything that came back
from the word Cybertruck using that as my search term.
Then, what I did is I pulled all that together,
looked for just the ones with the word Cybertruck in
the title and filtered out everything else.
And it turns out they got a ton of views.
You can see this massive spike the first day of the event.
And it's kind of trailed off and then came back.
A ton of attention and really just content generated
about this event on YouTube.
So in total they received over 101 million views
in only a few days.
And obviously, that generated tons of comments,
likes, shares, everything else.
This is just YouTube that we're talking about.
Obviously, there's the web, there's Facebook and Instagram,
and Twitter and everything else.
I mean really that one event generated a ginormous amount
of attention on the internet.
So, let's quantify that for a second,
in terms of dollar value.
If you look at Social Bluebook, which is kind of an
online evaluator of how much a brand would have to pay
somebody that creates content for a living
to make a video about them,
you can see it's right around 7 to 8 cents.
Now if you multiply that times the 101 million views,
That means, they would have to spend over 8 million dollars
to get that same amount of attention, just on YouTube,
not to mention all the other places where this stuff
was covered.
Now, yes there are some assumptions here
and some different ways of slicing and filtering
this data, for example; do you count the Verge
and Business Insider as mainstream media?
Or because they publish a lot of content on YouTube,
are they not? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to look at this.
But we're just trying to get a high level take of
the value of that event and inviting a bunch of Youtubers
to it.
But, yes, this is clearly a part of Tesla's strategy.
Despite them not spending any money on it,
I don't believe anyone was paid to come to the event.
They did invite us there and that was amazing,
so there is a really good kind of new version, modern sense
of how to use the internet to drive attention to your
brand and to your product.
And no one does it better than Tesla.
Now of course, this is nothing compared to what the other
traditional automakers spend.
GM, for example, spends over 3 billion dollars
a year in advertising.
And of course they sell millions of cars,
so it's kind of a different scale here,
but you get the sense that these other companies spend
a ton of money in advertising.
If you've been watching TV lately here,
it's the holiday season and yeah,
it's just flooded, bombarded with you know,
half-time shows presented by Toyota
or Chevy new car here, whatever.
There is just so much money dumped into this
by traditional car makers,
and they almost don't at all embrace the
new internet culture.
And that is where I see the brilliance of Tesla
in their marketing strategy, despite them not spending
any actual dollars on ads.
But, overall this one event that actually kind of
went sideways quick.
- (glass breaks) Oh my (bleep) God. Well.
- This one event generated just mountains of attention
online and basically everywhere that media is consumed.
Everyone is talking about this and the net result,
over 14 billion dollars in pre-orders and at least
8 million dollars of views that they would have normally
had to buy here on YouTube.
So, Tesla has a really smart marketing strategy here
that a lot of other companies really,
I should think should consider.
In fact, I know a lot of the tech companies are
doing this now, and you see how tech dominates
on YouTube and can really make or break a launch
of a new phone.
So, the same concept is playing out here in these
kind of more modern tech cars.
I'm curious whether or not any of the others are
going to start embracing this new internet culture or not
Leave me a comment down below and let me know what you think
and as always, don't forget;
when you free the data, your mind will follow.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys back
here on the next one.
Thanks for watching, I hope you guys are excited for the
holidays coming up, I'm going to put a link to a kind
of gift guide, something that I recommend,
products I actually use on my Teslas.
And so, these are things that if you have one,
if you're new to it, or maybe if it's someone else
and you want to buy them a gift;
you're definitely going to hit some home runs here
just by buying them these products.
And most of them are pretty cheap.
So, if you want to check that out,
link in the description down below.
- You're going this way.
- Okay.
- All right, have a good night.
- Yeah.
Whoa, wow. Cybertruck, it's insane.
Look at this thing. Look at this thing.
Wow, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say
this thing's kind of,
(mellow music)