How do you promote a more affordable EV? With guerrilla-style marketing

The growth in the US electric vehicle market may be slowing, but that isn’t stopping Slate Auto, a startup backed by investors including LA Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter and Jeff Bezos, from coming out strong.

Marketing Brew chatted with Slate’s head of brand and marketing, Ben Whitla, about the company’s marketing, which it’s rolling out amid slowing growth in the domestic EV market. The startup’s marketing, Whitla said, is designed to emphasize Slate’s personalization options and its lower price point in an effort to appeal to more cost-conscious consumers.

While the company has often been compared to other EV outfits that sell pricey cars, like Tesla and Rivian, Whitla said Slate’s pricing is more on par with used cars: an uncustomized Slate EV can cost less than $20,000 with the federal EV tax credit; without it, the price is around $27,500. That could stand to change with the Trump administration’s “big, beautiful bill,” which could gut those incentives and has already been passed by the House. (It’s now headed to the Senate.)

If incentives are indeed erased, Slate will still be “well-positioned in the US with a strong proposition of value, safety, and customization,” Whitla wrote in an email.

The company still plans to begin production in 2026 on the vehicles, which, when uncustomized, are relatively bare-bones: slate grey and with no radio. Customers can pay more to customize the vehicles with features like wraps and SUV kits.

“Being an electric vehicle is probably the least interesting thing about our car,” he said. “What makes us interesting is our personalization and our affordability.”

Go for a ride

Slate has been operating since 2022, but it made its public debut in April with a splashy campaign that involved parking a Slate vehicle on a street in Venice, California. Each day, the car was wrapped with an advertisement for a new fictional business, like CryShare, a business designed to drive babies to sleep, or The Feline Therapist (therapy for cats).

The goal of the fake advertisement stunt, Whitla said, was to get the Internet buzzing and grab some earned media.

“Our intention was to let the internet do what we believe the internet does best, which is try and solve a mystery,” he said. “We know the internet loves to solve a mystery. So we thought, ‘Let’s put a mystery out into the world and see if the internet solves it.’”

Beyond the out-of-home advertising, Slate has undertaken an aggressive influencer campaign with both paid and organic posts, Whitla said. That included recruiting a diverse array of influencers beyond just creators in the auto space in an effort to reach more of the consumer base that Slate is looking to court.

“We had chefs, dog groomers, outdoor enthusiasts, all sorts of people that really were not car audiences,” he said.

Blank slate?

Slate also sought to drive home its personalization options by bringing in influencers for early previews of the vehicle. The brand customized vehicles for each influencer tailored to their interests and personalities, Whitla said, including people like Jess Rona, a dog groomer with 473,000 followers on Instagram. By doing so, he said, influencers were likely more excited to share content about Slate with their followers.

“If the car at reveal was orange, you see 25 people talking about the same orange vehicle with basically the same pictures and videos,” he said. “That didn’t feel like us, and it didn’t feel like our personalization coming through.”

The company is positioning itself as a primarily digital-first brand, but, besides employing an OOH campaign, it has also dabbled in linear TV advertising. One 30-second ad, which ran during a recent episode of Saturday Night Live on NBC, showcases a fictional human-taxidermy business called Taxider-My-Family that uses a Slate vehicle to lug around the bodies of loved ones that have been, um, preserved. The full ad clocks in at almost two minutes, but it is running shorter, 15- and 30-second versions on digital and CTV.

Amid the marketing push, the company had already garnered over 100,000 reservations for its vehicle in mid-May, per TechCrunch. However, there are larger political and economic factors at play that could affect its growth. For one, macroeconomic uncertainty is rife amid the Trump administration’s haphazard implementation of tariffs, and consumers could tighten their purse strings, which might mean looking for more affordable vehicles to purchase—or holding off on big-ticket items entirely

Despite the broader landscape Slate is facing, Whitla downplayed its competition with other EVs.

“There are other cars and other EVs that people will try and compare us to, but the reality is, we should be compared to anyone who’s shopping at our price point,” he said.