SAN FRANCISCO: On a Monday afternoon in an Oakland, California, warehouse, actors dressed as Alice and the Mad Hatter and a man wearing a giant rabbit head sat around a table on a black-and-white checkered floor.
The Mad Hatter lifted a silver teapot and said in a high-pitched voice, “What is our AI search strategy?” A director called cut and told the actor to look straight into the camera lens in the next take.
Like many things in the Bay Area these days, the surrealist scene on a bustling set of about 20 film crew members was funded by an artificial intelligence startup. Daydream, an AI marketing services company, orchestrated the US$80,000 (RM317,408) video shoot to announce a US$15mil (RM59.51mil) funding round in a social media post.
San Francisco’s young AI companies have shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for film crews and camera equipment to make highly produced hype videos for social media. Fueled by a venture capital funding frenzy, founders are aiming for memorable – maybe even viral – videos to help recruit talent and simply get attention in an increasingly crowded field.
And many of these AI startups are embracing traditional video production, rather than doing it on the cheap with AI, because they don’t want them to look unprofessional.
“Everyone can build startups very quickly now, so in a way, it’s more competitive and the fight to be noticed is much higher,” said Thenuka Karunaratne, founder and CEO of Daydream.
Having a good story is just as important as having good technology, young tech entrepreneurs are being told by the people pouring money into their startups. Tech companies and venture capital firms are investing in new media ventures and “storytellers,” the tech term du jour for marketers.
Karunaratne, 29, figured his Alice in Wonderland homage – which took two days to film and included actors, a live white rabbit and a US$2,000 (RM7,935.20) rental fee for that costume head – would pay for itself as long as it attracted just one new customer.
AI startups like Daydream, he said, are willing to spend on attention-grabbing stunts because funding rounds are bigger and founders have more money “to play with.”
Lindsay Amos, an experienced marketer for Silicon Valley startups and venture capital firms, said that “there seems to be 50 startups working on the exact same thing, and often the differentiator comes down to marketing.”
Over the past year, she said, hiring film crews to make high-quality videos has become the default for startups that want to get noticed online. One of the standout examples that ignited this trend was a viral video by Cluely, an AI software startup, that cost about US$140,000 (RM55,546.40) to make, said Richard Zheng, 18, who directed the video.
In a less-than-two-minute scripted sketch, it shows Cluely’s CEO, Roy Lee, using his AI software to prompt him with information to lie about his age and life experience on a first date with a woman. The date fizzles out, and the video ends with the company’s tagline to use AI to “cheat on everything.”
A couple of months after releasing this video, Cluely raised US$15mil (RM59.51mil) in funding from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The company has continued to post outrageous videos, but changed its tagline and is marketing the business as an AI meeting assistant and note taker.
A common feature of these videos, Amos said, is that founders are often a main character or make a cameo.
Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, the founder of an AI startup called Nozomio, shot a roughly one-minute video in downtown San Francisco that mimics one of his favourite parts of the film The Social Network. He plays a young Mark Zuckerberg-like founder who yells and curses at a room of investors to announce his US$6.2mil (RM24.5mil) funding round.
In the past, Amos said, tech companies waited years before investing in a big television commercial. Facebook had its first commercial in 2012, eight years after the company, now Meta, was founded.
Aaron Epstein, a general partner at the San Francisco startup incubator Y Combinator, said he encouraged founders to launch as early as possible to get immediate feedback from potential customers online. Don’t delay by spending months stressed out about editing the perfect video, he tells them.
He added that high production values were not a requirement, but that they can help a young startup look “like a serious company” to potential customers. Many of these AI startups are run by founders in their early 20s who are using AI to make AI software products that they want to sell to big businesses.
“If people knew it was just, you know, two people in a living room that hacked this thing together over the last few weeks, people might not trust it as much, and so it’s one way to build trust with the audience,” Epstein said.
He added that AI video tools were also making it possible for more people to make creative videos on a tight budget and on a short timeline.
Still, Jason Zhu, a co-founder of Nen Creative, the marketing agency behind Daydream’s launch video, said there was a lot of demand from startups for human-made videos. Zhu, who runs the company with his brother Michael Zhu, said their team was working on an average of one or two video shoots per day, five days a week.
He said they had lost one deal to AI video tools after the potential customer decided that the shoot was too expensive for the company’s budget. Customers occasionally ask if they can use AI to speed up production, which Jason Zhu pushes back on because the technology can’t give him the quality he wants. But he’s not worried that artificial intelligence will completely replace his business, he said.
More companies are also hiring Nen Creative to do documentary-style videos about the startup or its customers, Zhu said.
“People want real stories to show real customers, and AI can’t do that,” he added. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
