Who Really Won The Super Bowl? It Might Have Been Tesla According To This Chart

The Los Angeles Rams won Super Bowl LVI. Another entity won big without spending any money.

What Happened: Electric vehicle giant Tesla Inc TSLA reported first-quarter financial results after market close Wednesday.

One item hidden in the company’s earnings slides without written context was a graph that showed demand for the company’s vehicles with an upward trajectory that coincided with Super Bowl LVI. The graph shows an arrow that points and is labeled the day after Super Bowl. The line graph is labeled as “Tesla Vehicle Gross Orders in the U.S. - Super Bowl Effect.”

Tesla influencer Sawyer Merritt highlighted the chart on Twitter:

Tesla reported record vehicle deliveries of 310,048 vehicles in the first quarter, up 68% year-over-year. The company also posted record quarterly revenue of $18.76 billion, coming in ahead of analysts’ estimates.

Related Link: Here Are Our Favorite Super Bowl LVI Commercials: Do You Agree? 

Why It’s Important: A commercial for Super Bowl LVI had a price tag of $6.5 million for 30 seconds for the game that aired on Comcast Corp CMCSA owned NBC.

Tesla did not buy a single Super Bowl commercial and saw rivals in the automotive sector not only spend money on ads but also dedicate portions of their commercials to attacking the EV leader.

Among the advertisers were Toyota Motor Corp TM, Kia, BMW BMWYY, General Motors Company GM, Nissan and Polestar, which is merging with Gores Guggenheim Inc GGPI.

Tesla has chosen not to spend money on commercials and focus on its product and strong word-of-mouth advertising instead. The move looks to have paid off and companies that targeted Tesla may have had a backward effect and helped their rival instead.

Benzinga reported earlier this year that Tesla saw a spike in search traffic on Google during the Super Bowl. That spike in search traffic looks like it led to some people reserving their own Tesla vehicle.

“This is the difference between Elon Musk and the other companies that feel threatened by him. Threatened to the point where they spend millions of dollars for one 30-second ad in the Super Bowl to make a point. These companies focus on Elon Musk,” Cleantechnica said at the time.

TSLA Price Action: Tesla shares are up 5% to $1,026.50 in after-hours trading Wednesday.