On a Monday afternoon in an Oakland, Calif., 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 A.I. 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 start-up. Daydream, an A.I. marketing services company, orchestrated the $80,000 video shoot to announce a $15 million funding round in a social media post.
San Francisco’s young A.I. 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 A.I. start-ups are embracing traditional video production, rather than doing it on the cheap with A.I., because they don’t want them to look unprofessional.
“Everyone can build start-ups 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 chief executive 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 start-ups. Tech companies and venture capital firms are investing in new media ventures and “storytellers,” the tech term du jour for marketers.
Mr. Karunaratne, 29, figured his Alice in Wonderland homage — which took two days to film and included actors, a live white rabbit and a $2,000 rental fee for that costume head — would pay for itself as long as it attracted just one new customer.
A.I. start-ups 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.”
“The bigger risk for any of these founders is less like running out of money and it’s more the fear around: Will you get to realize the vision and scale of the company to win the category before someone else?” he said.
Lindsay Amos, an experienced marketer for Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capital firms, said that “there seems to be 50 start-ups 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 start-ups that want to get noticed online. One of the standout examples that ignited this trend was a viral video by Cluely, an A.I. software start-up, that cost about $140,000 to make, said Richard Zheng, 18, who directed the video.
In a less-than-two-minute scripted sketch, it shows Cluely’s chief executive, Roy Lee, using his A.I. 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 A.I. to “cheat on everything.”
A couple of months after releasing this video, Cluely raised $15 million 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 A.I. meeting assistant and note taker.
A common feature of these videos, Ms. Amos said, is that founders are often a main character or make a cameo.
Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, the founder of an A.I. start-up called Nozomio, shot a roughly one-minute video in downtown San Francisco that mimics one of his favorite 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 $6.2 million funding round.
In the past, Ms. 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 start-up 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 start-up look “like a serious company” to potential customers. Many of these A.I. start-ups are run by founders in their early 20s who are using A.I. to make A.I. 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,” Mr. Epstein said.
He added that A.I. 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 start-ups for human-made videos. Mr. 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 A.I. 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 A.I. to speed up production, which Mr. 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 start-up or its customers, Mr. Zhu said.
“People want real stories to show real customers, and A.I. can’t do that,” he added.
While using A.I. to make a video is easier and cheaper, Kim Huong Tran, Daydream’s head of marketing, said she didn’t want the company to look sloppy.
“I feel like people would know,” she said. “If we had done that, it would just feel very cheap.”
