As most robotics startups remain years away from generating actual product sales, they urgently need eye-catching promotional material to sustain market interest. Months ago, a humanoid robot was transported to the summit of Ecuador's Chimborazo volcano, the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's center. The expedition was organized by Geologic Dome, a nonprofit using AI and robotics for conservation projects, and the robot was procured from the robotics division of crypto startup Virtuals Protocol.

Accompanying the robot up the mountain was a videographer carrying three cameras to capture footage for the nonprofit's promotional campaigns. One video shows the robot, dressed in a purple winter jacket and black mittens, trudging through snow at the summit; another clip features it dancing to swing music. These segments create the illusion that robots now possess human-level mountain-climbing abilities. In reality, the robot received extensive human assistance throughout its ascent of Chimborazo. During the four-day trek, a team of staff members took turns carrying the 70-pound device for most of the journey.

"We had 10 people, and about six of us ended up with back injuries after the expedition," laughed Pablo Berlanga Bomare, founder of Geologic Dome. With its robot-powered promotional stunts, Geologic Dome has waded into a major industry trend within the robot sector. As competition intensifies, companies are scrambling to produce ever more spectacular promotional videos packed with stunts and special effects. These clips are carefully edited and backed by extensive behind-the-scenes preparation, often polishing robot performance to the point of misleading viewers about their true capabilities.

Marketing is essentially a core function for every company. But for a vast number of robotics startups, promotional videos are currently, and for the foreseeable future, their only tool for maintaining market momentum. Despite continued venture capital inflows this year, most humanoid robot manufacturers are still at least several years, or even a decade, away from launching mature products that generate meaningful revenue. With R&D costs prohibitively high and no actual sales income, these companies can only rely on prototype demonstration videos to sustain market expectations and secure follow-on funding.

"The industry has entered a promotional video arms race - whoever creates the most stunning footage to capture public attention secures the most funding," said Ken Goldberg, co-founder of industrial robotics firm Ambi Robotics and a professor at UC Berkeley. "But viewers need to be wary of the exaggerated claims in these videos." Goldberg jokingly refers to this phenomenon as "video emptor," a play on the Latin phrase caveat emptor (buyer beware). Many of the most visually striking promotional videos come from Chinese robot companies, which have spread widely across U.S. social media and deepened perceptions that America is falling behind China in this field. For instance, Unitree Robotics has released videos showing its humanoid robots performing stunts like kicking through watermelons.

Just earlier this week, Unitree released footage of its humanoid robot achieving a vertical jump of 6.5 feet, less than a foot short of the human world record. (Three days later, the company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, raising $905 million.) American robot companies are also keeping pace. Tesla has released demonstration videos of its Optimus humanoid robot, while Boston Dynamics, long known for producing stunning demonstrations, this year released footage of its Atlas humanoid performing backflips. Among U.S. companies, Figure AI leads the pack in producing promotional videos, and it's also one of the highest-valued robotics startups.

The company has released videos of robots working in kitchens, interacting with dogs, and operating in a BMW factory, all set to upbeat electronic music. According to PitchBook data, Figure is also one of the industry's strongest fundraisers, having accumulated over $2 billion in financing over the past three years. The footage looks impressive but has drawn significant criticism: detractors say the promotional videos exaggerate robot capabilities and gloss over the reality of commercial deployment. When social media users called on Figure to show a robot working autonomously for eight consecutive hours, the company responded by livestreaming a robot continuously placing packages barcode-side-down onto a conveyor belt for 200 hours.

During the event, the company also staged an eight-hour race pitting the robot against an intern to see who could pack faster. The intern ultimately won by a narrow margin, prompting Figure CEO Brett Adcock to declare: "This will be the last time a human wins this race." Some robot companies package routine operations as breakthrough achievements. Brad Porter, founder and CEO of Cobot, a robotics startup serving warehouses and hospitals, says these companies exploit the public's limited understanding of robot capabilities to create surprise. Industrial robots have been performing difficult tasks in factories for years - "factory robots can lift thousands of pounds or feed giant paper rolls into paper mills," he noted.

Earlier this year, robot AI model company Skild AI released a video of a robotic arm handling circuit boards. Porter commented: "This isn't new technology, but viewers were amazed, marveling at how smooth the movements were. If you've been following the industry for the past 20 years, you'd know robotic arms have always been able to do this kind of work. I even joked that if Musk released footage of robots working in a car factory, the public would be even more shocked." When I asked Skild CEO Deepak Pathak about the video, he explained the demonstration differently: compared to traditional semiconductor industrial robots, their AI-driven solution costs far less to deploy, tunes up faster, and can handle unpredictable variations - scenarios that are challenging for conventional robots.

Viewers often come away from these promotional videos with an inflated sense of robot capabilities. On one hand, the humanoid form leads people to assume these machines can perform any task a human can; ordinary viewers also can't distinguish which tasks are easy for robots and which are extremely difficult. If you see a person doing gymnastics or karate, you'd naturally assume they can easily peel an orange - but fine-grained dexterity tasks remain a formidable challenge for even the most advanced humanoid robots. Within the industry, the "smoke and mirrors" techniques used in promotional videos are openly acknowledged: for example, footage may appear autonomous but is actually teleoperated by someone behind the scenes, or playback is sped up to make robots look faster. Last year, 1X Technologies released a video of its Neo humanoid doing household chores, but a human was controlling it in real time.

As audiences become increasingly savvy to these cinematic tactics, many robotics startups are now choosing a different path: showing the raw, unvarnished state of their robots as honestly as possible. Physical Intelligence, a startup whose team is largely composed of academic roboticists, simply mounts a fixed camera stretching to the ceiling to record robots at work. Boston Dynamics has also released unedited footage of robots falling over and dropping objects. Fona Shaw, managing director and production head at creative agency Across the Pond, who has served several leading robot companies, notes that promotional videos are now under intense scrutiny, and many companies want to be transparent and honest.

"They want to show the real product. There are so many flashy promotional videos in the industry that raw, unfiltered footage is actually more convincing." An example is Across the Pond's demonstration video for Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 1.5 AI model, where a robot uses grippers to sort apples, bananas, and limes by color onto red, yellow, and green plates. "The case may seem simple, but the technical thinking behind it is significant," said Google researcher Jie Tan in the video. "This model will drive more complex devices like humanoid robots in the future." Some companies show robots being shoved hard and staying upright; K-Scale Labs, however, released a video in 2025 where its CEO kicks a robot from behind, causing it to topple and break. Morgan Schmidt-Von, the director of that promotional video, said: "I'd rather tell a true story than fabricate an illusion." Even adopting a documentary-style approach didn't save K-Scale Labs - four months after the video's release, the company shut down.