Here’s why I think this -

On a recent Rogan podcast with journalist Matt Taibbi, the topic of discussion was how negative news drives the news cycle and gets the clicks. It sucks but it’s true. A negative story will get exponentially more attention than a positive one. The cable news networks live off of this principle.

Research appears to be driving marketing in the same direction. Trump continues to use this principle - say or tweet something dumb enough that people will want to show their friends how dumb you are. This results in millions of retweets and pushes people to react to things they’d otherwise ignore.

At the risk of brand image, I think Musk took a chance and knew some kind of screw up (in this case broken windows) would result in a gigantic spike in the truck’s exposure. My wife is a prime example. She could not care less about cars or the hyper truck, but when I brought it up to her that night, she already knew about it.

It wasn’t something that was crucial to the operation of the vehicle. it was something we have never seen before- windows that are shatter resistant. Cool, but not a deal maker or breaker. Perfect. They even went as far as to show a demo with cannonballs dropped from extreme heights into the glass without problems. They could have easily stopped there. Nope. Dude had to prove it by tossing the cannonball at the truck’s window eight in front of Elon and in the frame of where he’d be standing for the majority of the remaining time.

The negative press blew up. Everyone was tweeting and reporting about the egg on the face of Elon, myself included. There are still articles up about the “mishap.”

Watching it over again, I think it was clearly intentional. Very, very clever. I would love to see some kind of report on how much more exposure came to the truck because of the broken windows.

I also suspect we will start to see more intentional negative marketing like this going forward. What can be done to make you share or retweet it? What will make your product trend? Do that.