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November 11, 2007

Marketing the 2008 Tesla Roadster

tesla08.jpg

Celebrity endorsements have been a popular technique to market new products since the dawn of man (see "testimonials"). That said, credit to the marketing team at Tesla Motors for enlisting Michael "Flea" Balzary of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to author a guest blog post. Between the amateurish photograph of Flea greeting his new car and the genuine, seemingly unedited writing style of the post itself, I think this is the perfect approach for marketing this beautiful new product. Though I'm not even a fan of Flea or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, there's just something absolutely rockstar about a a rockstar talking about a zero emission vehicle like this. One can't help but share in his exhilaration over the purchase of his new car stemming not only from the design of the vehicle, but the fact that it's 100% electric. Flea says that his purchase of the Tesla was prompted by watching the film Who Killed the Electric Car?.

Flea writes about his first experience with the vehicle:

I get into it and pull away from the curb......dead silence wow!!!!.... man it was unbelievable. it drove like nothing i have ever been in before, made my porsche feel like a golf cart! It took off like a rocket ship, handled so sensitively, it was just amazing and fun and thrilling. I am so happy i went with my gut and bought that car. Yeah it is a long wait, but man, the thing is awesome. The silence makes ya feel like you are floating, and it just rocks, it was the funnest car, i have ever been in, with the possible exception of Hillel Slovak's Datsun B210 in 1979, he was the only guy i knew who had a car, and we listened to lot of zeppelin in there....

October 17, 2006

Robert Young on the Future of Advertising

An excellent article from Robert Young has been posted describing the current and potential strategic implications of the Google/YouTube deal. There's still quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere about this as many people are still stunned by this move. It's impressive to me that Eric Schmidt can say to the media companies, with a straight face, that Google does not want to be a player in the content world.