Unboxing videos that are not an afterthought

The unboxing gets made at the end. The main ad is done, somebody remembers the packaging is nice, and a box gets opened in a hurry on a kitchen worktop with a phone leaning against a mug.

An unboxing can answer questions the main advert leaves open: what arrives, how it is packed and what the customer will handle first.

Treated as an afterthought, it answers that badly. Treated properly, it is one of the cheapest things you will ever film.

What is somebody watching for?

Confirmation that the thing is real, and a small amount of anticipation.

The pleasure of watching something be opened is built entirely on delay. The pause before the lid moves, the resistance, the moment the contents become visible: that is the event. Everything before it is setup and everything after it is inspection. So the shape of a good unboxing is slower at the front than instinct suggests.

What people are checking, meanwhile, is unglamorous and specific. Is it the size they imagined. Does it look like the photographs. Is the packaging the kind that suggests care, or the kind that suggests a warehouse. Every one of those is answered in vision, and none of them by a voiceover saying the product name.

Sound does more of the work

Because sound can reveal details the picture misses.

Card tearing along a seal. A magnetic lid closing. Tissue paper. The dull knock of something heavy set on a wooden table. Those sounds are how a viewer decides, without deciding, whether this is a considered object or a cheap one, and the judgement happens before any claim is made.

Which produces the most useful instruction in this post. A quiet room matters more than a good camera. A phone recording in a silent kitchen beats a proper camera in a room with a fridge humming, a road outside and a laptop fan, because the phone captures the paper and the other one captures the paper underneath a wall of noise.

Choose a quiet time and position, close the door where practical and test the recording. Keep refrigeration and essential ventilation running. Remove jewellery if it taps the packaging and distracts from the sound you want.

Whose hands should be in shot?

Hands that let us see how the product is handled.

There is a way of handling a product that is unmistakably promotional: the slow rotation towards camera, the fingertips arranged at the edges, the object presented at the end of the sentence. Most people recognise it, and few trust it.

A customer opens a box differently. They use both hands. They put things down. They turn something over to look at the back, and they reach for whatever they were most curious about first, which is almost never what the brand considers most important.

Film that version. It means keeping the small hesitation, letting things be picked up in the wrong order, and resisting the urge to reshoot the moment a thumb covers a logo.

Where do unboxing videos go wrong?

Three things to watch for.

It is shot too fast

The whole point is the delay, and the instinct in editing is always to remove the delay. The lid comes off in a quick cut, the contents are already visible, and the moment the viewer came for has been optimised away. Slow the opening down and speed up the inspection afterwards, which is the opposite of how these usually get cut.

It cuts away at the moment

If there is one shot the video exists for, it is the contents becoming visible. A cut in the middle of it, however well matched, removes the thing that made it satisfying, because part of what is satisfying is that it is continuous. Hold the shot. If you must cut, cut before or after, not through.

The lighting hides the texture

Flat, bright, even light makes packaging look like a photograph of packaging. Texture appears when light comes from one side and rakes across a surface, which is what makes embossing, grain, matte card and brushed finishes look like themselves. Put your light off to one side rather than behind the camera, and let one side of the box fall darker.

What do you set up before you press record?

Four things to arrange before the take.

Get a second unit if you possibly can, because you only open a box once and the first attempt is always the rehearsal. Clear the surface, since the worktop behind your product is in the advert whether you meant it to be or not. Decide before you start which single moment the film is built around. And do a silent take of the room first, then listen back on headphones, which tells you what you are recording.

Where does this sit in an ad account?

Alongside the social proof, not below it.

We include unboxing where it answers a buying question. Testimonials show other people's experience; an unboxing shows the package, contents and handling. Test each for the role it plays in the campaign.

Which puts a straightforward question in front of you. If somebody is deciding whether to trust you with money, do you have anything at all that shows them what turns up. Most brands do not, and the material for it is sitting in the stockroom.

Sources and evidence

What here is backed by published research on unboxing, and what is our own filming choices.

What is established. Two peer-reviewed studies, one in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and one in the Journal of Business Research, find that the act of watching something be opened is itself rewarding and can raise how the contents are evaluated, framing unboxing as a form of vicarious, emotional consumption rather than merely an informative review. Neither study validates a specific staging rule, such as whose hands should be in shot or exactly how slow an opening should run; they support the broader claim that the delay and the reveal are doing real work on a viewer, not that any one studio's specific choices are the only way to capture it.

Our method. Slowing the opening down, holding the shot through the reveal rather than cutting through it, and filming a customer's unpractised handling rather than a presenter's, are this studio's working choices, not the only way to film one.

References.

• Sun, Y., Hou, Y. & Wyer, R. S. Jr. Decoding the opening process (unboxing). myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. Watching a package being opened is intrinsically rewarding and lifts evaluation of the contents. Measures affect/evaluation, not purchase or conversion.
• Vaudrey, R. K. A practice unpacked: unboxing as a consumption practice. scholars.cityu.edu.hk. Unboxing videos give a vicarious, more emotionally engaging product experience than a review. Qualitative practice theory; no quantified sales/conversion effect.