The Unboxing Mentality

On Youtube there's probably thousands of unboxing videos by now. Probably hundreds of thousands, in addition to PR advertisements and/or advertainment projects that get posted up. Remember the post-classic era of YouTube when these things started to happen with regularity? The products became rather professional and even mildly interesting, generating a lot of baseless enthusiasm for various products.

One of the earliest and most viral types of YouTube marketing was the "Will It Blend?" series, which clusterfucked all kinds of product placements and madness into one video every few days. In a way the series was a metaphor for itself.  People jumped onto these videos because they were more exciting than Lonelygirl15 and easier to find than interesting, creative, niche videos. I don't know if Blendtec sold a lot of blenders on the strength of this noteworthy advertising campaign, since it made everyone think that even food blended in the machine would turn into poisonous dust, but they sure got a lot of attention.

But I'm talking about the olden days of YouTube. These things all happened years ago. People actually got angry that Lonelygirl15 deceived them about being a real vlogger. For a while you'd see all kinds of angry comments about whether or not it was really a lone girl posting those videos. Most people came to their own conclusions, and in the end they turned it into a 'meh' series of shorts. This series didn't advertise for much except the performers in it.

However, the two corporate creations mentioned above gave some PR or adman the idea that you didn't have to create a persona to sell products and advertise on YouTube. Blendtec was too silly, Lonelygirl15 didn't really sell anything but belief that vlogging was worth anybody's damn – and the jury is still out about that. The solution is brilliant: just go to a real person who wants to get hits, give them an exclusive product to vlog about, and have them sell it for you.


Most of the product demonstrators are users I am not familiar with. These shills appear every week on the 'most viewed' list and disappear until they have another 'haul' of useless shit. People watch these videos wholesale, unaware that well-paid demonstrators look good in these products because they are good looking. In general there are two classes of unboxing videos. Unboxing videos are generally about unpacking a product from a closed box, and recording that event, then posting the video.

Is there anything worse than using bandwidth to watch someone's clumsy hands fiddle with packaging for ten minutes while breathlessly talking about the gloss of the cardboard? Go and watch a bunch of these videos. If anything the ones I put up are not even characteristic of the real stinkers.

But what kind of mentality have we uncovered? A multitude. There are people who do this to earn a little extra money, there are people who do this for the free products, and there are people who do this because that is the work their agent has secured for them. Not all unboxers, haul displayers, or product shills are the same. I'm sure they all have different stories they'd tell if they weren't waiting to get the latest thing in the mail. And all of this is incredibly wasteful, of course, showing everyone who isn't in PR how much free product needs to be thrown around to get a consumer's appetite up.

By using regular people, or models who pose as regular people, or industry insiders who pretend to be regular people, or just headhunting YouTube channels with lots of subscribers, marketers can basically find anybody they want on the internet and market to them. Remember the game Minecraft? Minecraft sold well because of its YouTube presence. It may be the first game to owe its success to the unboxing mentality, but it certainly won't be the last. The technique is pretty obvious in both cases: find a user who is popular for videos of gameplay footage, give them a free copy of the game, and profit.

With that basic strategy, marketers don't even need to be hired. The product developer just needs a few good YouTube contacts with many followers, and the hype machine will construct itself. So the unboxing mentality is about as empty as the packaging it pornographically diddles in each video, but it provides results anyway. While print media and television are ruled by cadres of high-paid executives and powered by unpaid interns, the internet is a cost-effective substitute where the smaller business is sometimes capable of making the larger impact.