Lume is not only a modern and expensive lamp, but also acts as a laundry folding genius. And to promote and give this alien-looking robot housekeeper a human face ahead of its launch this summer, the company behind it has launched a major video campaign on social media.
There’s a launch video, a 10-minute documentary about the founders of Syncere, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this documentary. The documentary begins with a sunrise, follows the founders making coffee, playing basketball in the driveway, working on the Lume prototype in the backyard and finally ends with them ending the day with the family at the dinner table. The videos come from Offscript, a studio that describes itself as a “storytelling company written by filmmakers, not advertisers” for startups.
The emerging trend for bold and stylish launch videos has “opened the floodgates for a lot of these tech companies and confirmed that there is a need for media,” says Alli Gooch, a 27-year-old filmmaker behind Offscript. “The documentary is something like an elevated version of ‘Building in Public,'” she says. “It’s all about authenticity.” Nearly 50,000 people watched the Syncere documentary on X last month, and more than a million saw the launch video.
If you blink, you miss the opportunity
Founders’ desire to take the direct route and bypass traditional media to tell their story directly to their customers without critical scrutiny is partly driving this trend toward original, in-depth videos. Companies are also giving these filmmakers access because technology is advancing so rapidly right now. Founders feel the pressure to make customers understand what a company does and why it matters in a sea of startups that could fail. That’s why they spend a lot of money to present themselves and their ideas like stars.
Companies today need to “constantly tell their company story,” says Josh Machiz, chief marketing officer at venture capital firm Lightspeed. “In this phase of AI in Silicon Valley, you have to document the history of your company.”
If you blink, you might miss the chance to capture the big breakthrough.
Don’t drown in the sea of AI slop
Storytelling has become one of the most in-demand jobs in companies. Pioneering AI labs are advertising communications positions with salaries of around half a million dollars, showing that companies are willing to pay a high price for someone who can make their company story special in a sea of AI garbage. Founders binge on hour-long podcast interviews with high-profile content creators and avoid traditional media. Andreessen Horowitz has its own news live stream that broadcasts eight hours a day. The venture capital firm also launched a new media team last fall to give founders what they “need to win the narrative battle online.” It’s easier than ever to get an idea off the ground, and attention online has never been more fragmented.
The most successful example of attention-grabbing comes from “The Thinking Game,” a nearly 90-minute documentary that follows Google DeepMind as it develops AlphaFold, a Nobel Prize-winning AI project to sequence proteins. The film followed the conventional documentary route, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival before streaming on (Google subsidiary) YouTube last fall; it has since racked up more than 400 million views. The film captivated viewers like any other documentary, but Google, the subject of the film, is also its distributor.
Who deserves a full-length film
Most startups don’t deserve a feature-length film, but still want to get people talking on social media with short, snappy videos. Last year, more startups decided they needed launch videos, breaking the trend of going into stealth mode via a LinkedIn post. A rom-com video from AI app Cluely, which deals with “cheating in all walks of life,” garnered 13 million views on Authenticity and humanity are important to consumers, especially when you are trying to make your AI startup attractive to them. In a video announcing its new, affordable MacBook Neo, Apple played with the idea of their laptops being man-made, showing a pair of hands crafting the various features.
“It’s widely accepted that good presentation online can potentially yield huge, outsized returns, and knowing how to generate and attract attention is extremely valuable,” says Donald Jewkes, a 26-year-old software engineer turned filmmaker who has worked on short videos about robotics and AI programming.
Jewkes released a 15-minute mini-documentary last month about Jmail, a project that friends of his created to present Jeffrey Epstein’s emails in a Gmail-like interface. They developed Jmail in just five hours, and more than 150 million people used it. Jmail’s viral success is just a small part of the fast-paced news cycle surrounding the Epstein files that might have gone undocumented, but Jewkes and his camera were quickly on hand to interview the people behind the project. “The inner workings and the background, how it felt to be there – all of that would have been lost,” says Jewkes. “I really felt the need to capture that and show it to the world.”
Classification for the chaos innovation era
Companies need clever marketing to make themselves popular at a time when innovation seems like impending chaos to many. Public perception of AI has cooled. The only issues that were more unpopular among respondents to an NBC poll in March were the Democratic Party and Iran. Videos of humanoid robots on social media often scare people. Scandals at companies like FTX and Theranos have increased pressure on startups to provide investors with evidence of what they are developing.
These new era documentary filmmakers see themselves neither as critical journalists nor as part of the kind of commercial marketing that a film agency would do. They spread a message about where future innovations are headed. “We’re pretty much in agreement about what we want to tell, which is the story of technological and scientific progress,” says James Lin, a 23-year-old filmmaker, about the companies he works for and his own interests. He doesn’t accompany a company to uncover scandals, but says if he saw a fraud like Theranos or actions that didn’t align with his values, he would think, “I can’t continue this project, it doesn’t feel right.”
From MIT researcher to filmmaker
Lin’s camera skills are largely self-taught. He studied neuroscience and previously worked as a researcher at MIT, but says AI could dramatically change the nature of scientific research even before automation displaces filmmakers. “Once robotics gains traction, it will be able to do science really well,” says Lin, telling me that he worked with friends (including Jewkes) on a viral launch video for Waves, which makes camera glasses. He now supports biotech companies and says his background in neuroscience helps him analyze and communicate the complex topic. “I’m less interested in the drama and more interested in how science is created.”
The tech-friendly age of new media is a boon for startups. People hate traditional advertising, but younger audiences demand authenticity from the brands they support. As AI lowers the barriers to content creation, the demand for quality increases. “We rely entirely on technology,” says Juliana Glodek, who also runs Offscript. “We can tell these stories that are at the forefront of history.”
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.