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.<\/p>\n
The Mad Hatter lifted a silver teapot and said in a high-pitched voice, \u201cWhat is our A.I. search strategy?\u201d A director called cut and told the actor to look straight into the camera lens in the next take.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n San Francisco\u2019s 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 \u2014 maybe even viral \u2014 videos to help recruit talent and simply get attention in an increasingly crowded field.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t want them to look unprofessional.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone can build start-ups very quickly now, so in a way, it\u2019s more competitive and the fight to be noticed is much higher,\u201d said Thenuka Karunaratne, founder and chief executive of Daydream.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cstorytellers,\u201d the tech term du jour for marketers.<\/p>\n Mr. Karunaratne, 29, figured his Alice in Wonderland homage \u2014 which took two days to film and included actors, a live white rabbit and a $2,000 rental fee for that costume head \u2014 would pay for itself as long as it attracted just one new customer.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cto play with.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe bigger risk for any of these founders is less like running out of money and it\u2019s more the fear around: Will you get to realize the vision and scale of the company to win the category before someone else?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Lindsay Amos, an experienced marketer for Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capital firms, said that \u201cthere seems to be 50 start-ups working on the exact same thing, and often the differentiator comes down to marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, an A.I. software start-up, that cost about $140,000 to make, said Richard Zheng, 18, who directed the video.<\/p>\n In a less-than-two-minute scripted sketch, it shows Cluely\u2019s 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\u2019s tagline to use A.I. to \u201ccheat on everything.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A common feature of these videos, Ms. Amos said, is that founders are often a main character or make a cameo.<\/p>\n