As Tesla’s sales slide, insiders say it left creative ideas on the cutting-room floor without allowing its nascent marketing team to launch its first significant marketing campaign
Investors were enthusiastic when founder and chief executive Elon Musk declared the business was set to “give advertising a go” having eschewed it for 20 years. However, 10 months on, the 40-person “global growth” team tasked with delivering on this has been laid off, with former staffers sharing that none of the campaigns they had been working on saw the light of day.
Greg Costanzo, a senior production manager who joined the team in late Feb. 2024, wrote on LinkedIn that people were laid off before “any real creative work or campaigns of our own went live.”
“Although I am disappointed, it was the most gratifying, challenging, and invigorating two months of my career,” he added.
A source with knowledge of the matter told ADWEEK that a bigger creative strategy was in the works; the team didn’t get a proper shot at it. The group was still establishing processes and on the brink of shooting its first significant work when the plug was pulled.
Naveet Gill, a senior performance manager at the brand until this week, wrote on LinkedIn he was one of the founding members who spearheaded Tesla’s advertising efforts in North America.
“I was described as a ‘one-man marketing team’ since I was responsible for developing strategy and executing marketing campaigns,” he said.
“Since these initial days, the team had grown with world-class talent [who were] developing full-funnel marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, the team was laid off before any of these campaigns were launched,” Gill continued.
But Musk, it seemed, had grown impatient with the early marketing efforts: Confirming Tesla’s decision to axe the department, Musk took to X with his take: “The ads were far too generic,” he said. “Could’ve been for any car.”
Staff were informed of the unexpected decision via an email on Sunday as part of a wider layoff initiative targeting more than 10% of the car challenger’s 140,500 employees.
Tesla still has a small pool of marketing staff in Europe, per Bloomberg.
ADWEEK has reached out to Tesla for further comment.
Post Musk’s chaotic takeover of X (formerly Twitter) and months of chronic sales slumps for Tesla, investors were buoyed by the prospect that advertising, done well, could help the carmaker bounce back.
But this week’s earnings showing a 9% drop in first-quarter revenue underscore some of the wider economic challenges for the carmaker.
