Its unfathomable to think a company spent 1/190th of the advertising budget of their closest competitor and outsold them by 3X, but thats just what Tesla did. Mercedes Benz is an advertising powerhouse, yet was outdone by something more powerful, context. While Mercedes Benz was telling the world to buy their cars, Telsa was having a conversation about living fossil fuel free. That allowed them to break through, and drive sales without the need for advertising.
Advertising is designed to distract away from the consumer's task at hand, while context seeks to match it. To see the power of context look no further than Facebook. Each time you log on to Facebook there are over 1,000 posts awaiting you, yet their algorithms only show you the ones contextual to you to the moment. This is why we've seen organic reach on social media decline below 1%. Without context to the moment, there is no way our messages will make it through. Context is the future of marketing because consumers demand it, the new media environment supports it, and it is proving to be a much greater driver of consumer action than advertising.