If you were to open your social feed right now, what would you expect to see?
A beautifully lit studio shot of a skincare bottle, perhaps? An influencer with a filtered face holding a product they clearly don’t use? Or maybe a bizarre AI-generated video where the hands have seven fingers, and the skin looks like plastic?
We are living in the uncanny valley of advertising. We call it “AI Slop.”
It is polished, scalable, and completely hollow. But the problem isn’t just that it looks fake. The problem is that it is failing.
Marketers are under a massive amount of pressure. Platforms like Meta and TikTok are serving ads more frequently, and users are scrolling faster than ever. The results just end up in massive creative fatigue.
That same studio asset that used to have a shelf life of 8 to 12 weeks is now burning out in only 2 weeks. Brands that turned to AI to fix this volume problem got their wrists slapped by audiences who instantly rejected the synthetic feel. Meanwhile, the “Creator Economy” solution is cracking because consumers have gotten savvy. They know the influencer is paid. They see the contract behind the smile.
The most scarce asset in the digital advertising economy is no longer attention. Its authenticity.
That’s precisely why we rebranded from 203 Media to StreetTalk.
We are betting the house on the one thing that algorithms, AI, and filtered influencers cannot replicate. We bank on the honest, unscripted, and verified opinions of strangers on the street.
StreetTalk didn’t start in a boardroom. It began with a risk.
In 2024, our founder, Josh Suggs, was 23 years old and standing at a crossroads. He saw an opening in the market and a hunger for raw “man on the street” content that brands were ignoring. But pursuing it meant dropping out of college and deep diving into the unknown.
Naturally, as any parent would be, Josh’s parents were concerned. They reached out to a longtime colleague and family friend for a “sanity check.”
That colleague was Jesse Eisenberg.
At the time, Jesse was the Chief Growth Officer at Tinuiti, the largest independent performance marketing agency in the U.S. He had spent 17 years scaling that business from $1 million to over $200 million. He knew the digital advertising industry inside and out, for better and for worse.
Josh’s parents expected Jesse to be the voice of reason. Instead, he told them the thing no parent most likely wants to hear: “Let him drop out.”
Jesse saw something in Josh’s raw footage that reminded him of his own brother. It was a chaotic, intuitive understanding of what actually makes people stop scrolling. He recognized that Josh was not just making videos. He was capturing a cultural shift toward unscripted truth.
After that phone call, Josh leaped. He hit the streets of New York, microphone in hand, with zero social anxiety and a mission to get the truth out of strangers.
Fast forward to today. That gamble has evolved into a rapidly growing, authentic advertising agency that has conducted 10,000+ interviews for more than 150 brands.
But to turn this explosive, creative format into a scalable enterprise solution, StreetTalk needed more than just viral hits. We needed rigor. We needed to bring in “the big guys.”
That brings us to the second half of our origin story. Jesse Eisenberg hasn’t just joined as an advisor; he steps in as our CEO.
You may consider, “Why would an executive leave the pinnacle of the performance marketing world to join a ‘street interview’ agency?”
Because the game has changed.
For the last decade, marketers won by hacking the media buying algorithm, tweaking bid caps, targeting niche audiences, and gaming the system. But today, AI has commoditized media buying. The robot does the targeting for you.
As Jesse puts it, “Brands don’t have a media optimization problem. They have a creative problem.”
The latest updates from Meta are explicitly calling for “Concept Diversity.” They do not just want more ads. They want different types of storytelling. Most in-house teams do not have the bandwidth or the skills to churn out high-volume, high-diversity creative.
Authenticity, once just a branding mechanism, has evolved into a conversion lever.
We are not just a production company. We are defining a new asset class called Conversation Creative.
Conversation Creative is a performance-engineered methodology. It mirrors the psychology of how people shop in the real world.
First, we use Pattern Interruption. Like a great window display, we stop the scroll with a question.
Second, we handle Objections. Like a helpful sales associate, we discuss the product’s reality.
Third, we provide Social Proof. We provide the vicarious experience. You watch a stranger smell, taste, or try the product, and you trust their reaction because they are just like you.
It differs from traditional User Generated Content (UGC) in three critical ways:
This format also kills two birds with one stone. Because our content is natively question-and-answer, it is perfectly structured for the AI search engines of tomorrow. Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity crave direct answers to human questions. We aren’t just feeding social feeds. We are feeding the algorithms that decide what is true.
The data backs this up. Across the StreetTalk portfolio, Conversation Creative is driving 5x higher engagement than ad account averages and a 33% lower Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) compared to benchmarks. For top-tier accounts, this has allowed for a 20x increase in spend.
We rebranded to StreetTalk because we believe the future of advertising isn’t artificial—it’s human.
We are entering a new economy where trust is the currency. While the rest of the industry is trying to figure out how to use AI to generate more content for less money, we are doing the hard work of going outside and talking to people on the streets.
We are building the bridge between the chaotic, raw energy of the street and the disciplined performance of the boardroom. We are capturing the Ground Truth that every brand needs and every AI engine is starving for.
No scripts. No actors. Just humans. Just the truth.
Welcome to StreetTalk.
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