Lume: A Modern and Expensive Lamp That Doubles as a Laundry Folding Genie Lume, a modern and expensive lamp, is more than just a lighting fixture. It also doubles as a laundry folding genie, thanks to its advanced technology. The company behind Lume has launched an all-out high-gloss social media video blitz to hype and humanize this alien-like robo housemaid before it starts shipping this summer. Lume isn't just a modern and expensive lamp; it doubles as a laundry folding genie. The company behind it has launched an all-out high-gloss social media video blitz to hype and humanize this alien-like robo housemaid before it starts shipping this summer. There's a commercial launch video, a 10-minute-long documentary about Syncere's founders, and a behind the scenes doc about the making of that doc. The documentary opens on a sunrise, follows the founders as they make coffee, shoot hoops in a driveway, work on the Lume prototype in a backyard, and eventually end the day sitting around a dining room table with family.The videos come from Offscript, a studio that describes itself as 'a storytelling company, written by filmmakers, not advertisers,'. The rising trend of the cheeky and sleek launch video has opened the floodgate for a lot of these tech companies and validated that there is a need for media. The documentary is just kind of like a higher-end version of building in public, it all goes back to authenticity.Nearly 50,000 people have watched the Syncere documentary on X over the past month, and more than 1 million have seen the launch video. Founders' desire to go direct, circumventing traditional media outlets to tell their story straight to their customers without scrutiny, in part fuels this pivot to original, in-depth video. Companies are also granting access to these filmmakers as technology advances swiftly.Founders feel the pressure to make customers understand what a company does and why it matters in a sea of startups that might fail. So they're splurging on star-treatment for themselves and their ideas. Storytelling has become one of the hottest corporate jobs. Frontier AI labs are opening communications roles with salaries of about half a million dollars, showing companies will pay a premium for someone who can make their corporate story a splash in a sea of AI slop.Founders will sit for hours-long podcast interviews with high-profile creators and shun traditional media. Andreessen Horowitz has its own news livestream that airs 8 hours a day. The venture 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 online attention has never been more fractured.The most successful example of commanding attention comes from 'The Thinking Game,' a nearly 90-minute-long documentary that follows Google DeepMind as they develop AlphaFold, a Nobel Prize-winning AI project to sequence proteins. The film took a conventional documentary route and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, then began streaming on (Google subsidiary) YouTube last fall; it's since drawn more than 400 million views.Most startups don't merit a feature-length film, but they still want to own the conversation with short, sparkly videos on social media. Last year, more startups decided they needed launch videos, departing from a trend of leaving stealth mode via a LinkedIn post.A romcom video from the 'cheat on everything' AI app Cluely garnered 13 million views on X. Friend, the much maligned white pendant AI companion, has released videos over the past year following users, including a woman who says she had a seizure while filming the short doc, and then quickly checks to make sure her companion is ok