Bonus: How Street Interviews Became a Performance Creative Pillar (15,000 Ads Later)

0:00Street Talk sells authenticity. We bring your product to every major city and get your exact demographics, live, authentic reaction to your brand, clip up those reactions, and hand deliver it to you to run for paid media. People are on social media to be entertained, so your ads can't look like ads. And that's exactly why street interview ads have been the top performing ads for Grooms, for Dr. Squad, for Factor Meals, for Goalie, Carver Snacks, Everyday Dose, David, Monopoly, Board Games, and dozens and dozens and dozens more. Every single brand in the world needs content, and every single brand is a media company.

0:35So we're going to supply them with that media.

0:43Welcome to the D2C podcast. Today, we are lucky to be sponsored by Street Talk and even luckier to have the founder in, Josh Slug's welcome. I would have wanted to kind of talk to you anyways. Honestly, we're finding on the pilot house side that this style of ad that Street Talk does, this man on the street style is sort of ending up a winner in a lot of cases. So I feel like it's a really great time to have you on and make sure the DTC audience knows about what you're doing. Love it. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate being a big fan of the show for a long time. And yeah, I couldn't be more excited.

1:12Okay, just in one sentence, what does Street Talk do for a brand? Street Talk sells authenticity. We bring your product, your brand to the streets of every major city and get your exact demographic, live, authentic reaction to your brand. Clip up those raw and authentic reactions, edit it, and hand deliver it to you to run for paid media. Take me back to the beginning because I know you've had a pretty crazy origin story. I like to ask about people's hero's journey. So walk me through your hero's journey with why you started TreatTalk. So I'm sure a lot of brand founders have heard of Tabs Chocolate.

1:51So Oliver Bacato was the founder of Tabs Chocolate when it was viral. Brands on TikTok four years ago now. And I've known Oliver for 15 years. He called me up when I was 18 and asked me to help him come run content for Tabs. I didn't know what UGC was. I didn't know what Ecom was. I didn't know what MediaBang was. I didn't know what any of this stuff was. but I would love social media and I'm obsessed with social media. My parents were going through a divorce and I didn't want to go home. So Oliver and I moved to Miami. We shared a mattress on the floor and I learned e-commerce and UGC content.

2:21And he gave me my start. Tabs scaled. It became one of those vital brands in America. I went back to college for one year. And then he asked me to start doing street reviews for his business after Tabs called Study Buddy. That app was his business after tabs and he was like his competitor was doing man on the street videos called quizzered he's like i want you to be the street review guy for study buddy and i was like i'm in i wanted to get back into social media i was in college i didn't have a business and i would desperately saw my best friend you know becoming really really successful with tabs and now the sass and i was like i need to do something this is something i can do street reviews started doing it for him he paid me two thousand dollars for 30 street review videos and i was like holy shit i'm rich of shit.

3:02And that summer, instead of starting a corporate internship, I quit that internship to go to stream views for brands. And we had a few friends brands, they paid me 500 bucks, 1000 bucks, 1200 bucks for bachelor's stream reviews. I went on Twitter, I posted on Twitter, said I need an editor. One guy DM me, his name was Kamika. He said, I'll be your editor. And I said, okay, Kamika, you're hired. And every day that summer, I ran around Washington Square Park, Soho, downtown Manhattan, walked 40 ,000 steps, interviewing people about brands. And it spread like wildfire. From referrals only, no personal brand, no ads, no outreach, nothing.

3:41I was a ghost on social media. I didn't even post. I wasn't even doing this on Instagram or TikTok or anything. I started posting on Twitter a little bit. But just from referrals, scaled to 80 brands, made$150 ,000. And that summer, every night, I'd go to the Apple store. I'd upload my footage at an Apple store because there's no place. There's no Wi-Fi. I had no place to live in New York. I was still on Oliver's couch. Yes, I was making an August where I really made a lot of money, but that's true in July. I was still on Oliver's couch. No building would rent to me. I couldn't get a place to live.

4:10And yeah, scaled it to 80 brands and decided to drop out of college, build it into a full agency. And for that full year, I ran around New York. I was averaging 26 miles about a marathon every single day. All winter, I'd ride the subways, ride the subways up and down, interview people when it got cold out. because, you know, brands didn't want me wearing a big jacket around New York City. They wanted me, you know, they wanted people not to look all bundled up. And yes, slowly but surely built it into a total agency. So you literally came from the streets. Came from the streets. Can you talk about any of your big client wins from those early days?

4:47Like what were some of the, I don't know, best results or best content you were able to produce, the content you were most psyched about? Yeah, I mean, pretty early on, because of Twitter and because of referrals, I was able to you know breeze was one of my first clients ever and Aaron I gave him a little bit cheaper of a rate and he'll post the videos on Twitter I went out that summer I think it was August of 2024 when I did Man on the Street videos for Breeze FaceTimed Aaron at the Apple store uh while I was uploading the footage from the day and I was like guys can't wait to show you guys the videos that next day had edited ready to go I had a game of 24-hour turnaround time The video is a banger.

5:26It cooked in their ad account. He posted it on Twitter, tagged me, and he drove me like 15 clients from that post. This is something that we've done at D2C. It's, again, something we see at Pilot House that works. Why do you think, let's get into the mechanics of why street talk, man on the street style interviews work. Why do you think they work so well? Totally, for a bunch of reasons. One, it brings your customer through your entire funnel in 45 seconds, right? From awareness, consideration to conversion, all in that 45-second street interview video. You're now making someone, your brand's exact demographic is who you go out and find on the street.

5:59We go make them aware about your brand. We make them consider it by trying it, by tasting it, by having them review it. Then we make them convert by giving their real testimonial of why they love your brand. And that will convert way more trust with the viewer watching that video than any paid influencer, paid UGC video, or scripted commercial. every single time. Then it doesn't look like an ad, right? It looks like a regular engaging content form that's native to the feed that someone's going to naturally consume, right? People are on social media to be entertained. They're on social media not to watch commercials.

6:35So your ads can't look like ads. And that's exactly why street interview ads have been the top performing ads for Gruens, for Dr. Squad, for Factor Meals, for Goalie, Conover, Snacks, Everyday Dose, David, Monopoly, Board Games, and dozens and dozens and dozens more. That's wild. Do they have to be funny? Because most of the time when I see man on the street interviews, they're funny, they're outrageous. Like, do they have to be that or can they be straight? You still want to follow direct response marketing principles, but on the street, right? So what we do is you can send out anyone with a microphone to go get reactions.

7:04That's not going to convert in your ad account, right? We've done 15 ,000 man on the street videos. We know exactly how it's going to make them. Drop your CAC, increase your ROAS, and make these perform by following direct response marketing principles. And you're still doing problem solution formats. For example, let's say you're instant hydration liquid ID, right? We'll go out and I'll say, what's your worst hangover story? Tell me their hangover story. After 10 seconds, well, what do you do when you're hungover? Oh, well, I go and get a bacon and cheese. You want a bacon and cheese? You need electric sea salt, right?

7:29You need these premium electrolytes. You need value props, value props, value props, value props. We actually have it with us. Do you want to give it a try? Boom. Live taste test. You're not talking about the pain points of why someone's actually going to buy the brand from their exact demographic, a use case of why they would go out and purchase it. Now, as the consumer, when I watch that, I'm like, I get hungover. I need electrolytes. This is a reason I would buy that product. I trust that way more. And it's a reason that would make me actually want to purchase your product, not just watching entertaining video, right?

7:56If I'm Celsius, people aren't buying Celsius for the taste that tastes like orange, right? A lot of people would go out. If I'm a brand and I'm trying to figure out how to go to stream, I see this time and time again on sales calls, right? We can just have someone else to try a product. That's not like someone buying the product. They buy the product for what it does for them. And that's exactly what Street Talk does and why our stream ads actually perform in ad accounts. Super wild. And it's also like people would almost pay for this just for the ad intelligence side or the intelligence side, like the product, the product feedback cycle.

8:25Like I imagine it, you know, the things that people say end up finding their ways into other ads and, you know, other UGC ads and things, because that's really what you're looking for is people's honest responses, right? Exactly. And we give all of our clients the raw content as well. And we encourage all of our clients to use the raw content and use it in their founders ads, their VSLs, their UGC content. A lot of the times these stream view reactions have a higher hook rate than any ad in your entire ad account. So why not, if you have a UGC ad that it's really hard direct response, it's doing super, super well.

8:54Why not sub it out with a stream view hook into that same direct response ad? And that's what a lot of our clients do. And that's been absolutely crushing for our clients as well. Cool. Where does this live in an ad account? Like how does it, you know, we're always talking about creative diversity on the podcast. We're always talking about different avatars. How does, how do, how do these ads fit in an ad account essentially? Yeah. So in your ad account, right, you need pillars, right? So you need podcast ads, you need founder's ads, you need unboxing, you need UGC content, and you need authenticity.

9:25Now more than ever, you need authenticity. Consumers hate AI slop. They don't trust AI slop. And brands, they're finally starting to come around to it now. They're realizing we can use AI to make funny cartoon ads that are blatantly AI. Consumers don't want to feel tricked. They want to feel bamboozled. So for the brands that are out there faking their street reviews, that's going to destroy your customer's trust. Don't try to fake them by doing a fake street interview that's going to take you 10 hours to prompt it. No, do AI ads. That's going to be a pillar in every single brand's ad account 100%.

9:57But guess what else is going to be a pillar in your ad account? Authenticity. And that's exactly what we're selling. Your customer's raw, authentic, human emotion reaction to your brand. And then nothing else is going to build trust like a straight interview ad. All right. So say we're talking about my side hustle, building a, uh, an electrolytes brand where we're at scale already. Let's say what, what, what does the process look like? I come to you guys. I'm like, all right, like what do you need from us to make sure that you can go out there and, and crush some interviews? You're going to give us a very comprehensive onboarding material.

10:26That's going to be your top performing ads, your value props. What makes you guys different? Who's your customer? What are their pain points? Why are they buying? You're gonna give us all that material from there. You're gonna hop on an onboarding call, we're going to discuss vision, right? For factor, right? We'd be walking around with microwaves. For prize picks, we had people at the Super Bowl and doing a whole activation. That's where we assess exactly what we want to do together. From there, our trade strategists are going to brief a five-page stream view brief outlining a dozen different stream view concepts, targeting your brand and exactly what's going to make people not just stop in the street and have fun with your brand, but also convert in your ad account.

10:58Every month, we go out and we film 10 stream view ads in every single major city in America. Edit it and get it for the brand and run paid media. And you said this earlier, these are quite often the top winners in the accounts that they run. We've scaled brands from 40K a month to 750 ,000 a month in spend. I mean, we're PrizePix top ad for almost five months now. I was up against 8 ,000 creatives and our stream ads have been the top ad in PrizePix's entire creative portfolio. So even just back to your origin story, but you're 20, you was 23 or 24? I just turned 23. I mean, even Cloudy. Cloudy was scaled heavily during COVID.

11:31I'm sure you owe Jesus even before tabs. Their account average was a 1.3 ROAS. Our stream views last month, 2.8 ROAS. Wild. So the scaling of the business has just come from the result. Like you see these results, you see how it's working. I turned on ads four weeks ago. We scaled to a four and a half million dollar run rate from referrals and retention. That's, yeah, that's just like operators talking probably, right? That's just, we got shouted out at My First Million. I was going to cover the Wall Street Journal on the Operators Marketing Podcast with Cody and Cody from Jones Road and Hex Class Founder.

12:04They talk about us all the time. I mean, it's just from word of mouth referrals and us being enterprise clients, you know, top performing ads in an ad account. They share with their friends. What do you think stops? Because I think a lot of brands know this is a good idea and they're going to sign up with you guys. But what stops them from doing it themselves? Yeah, I mean, I can go out there and try to figure out how to, you know, cook you a hamburger or you have Gordon Ramsay cook you a hamburger, right? Like, it's hard to do. We have all the data. we know how to make these streamed ads, not just you can't go to stop the street, but actually perform in your ad account.

12:33We've made 15 ,000 of these ads. Do you want to go have some random person walk around the microphone and try to get people to make, you know, talk about your brand? Or do you want to actually go out there and make you an ad that's going to convert? You want to pay us anywhere from 7 ,500 bucks all the way up to$20 ,000, depending on who you are and the scope of work. But do you want to pay us, you know, half of what you pay a salaried worker to figure out how to go and do this? Or, right, do you want to go try to figure out for six months how to make this work for yourself. Are there any categories of brand that this doesn't work for?

13:03It's harder to do it for brick and mortar stores. It's harder to do this for insurance companies and stuff. It's a little bit less mass market. And we've had Settlement. We took from$45 ,000 a month to spend to$550 ,000 a month to spend in less than nine months. That's from stream reviews and podcast ads. It just makes sense that you're always looking for ways to grow your awareness. And people instantly recognize things as either AI or ads very quickly. This has this native ad format that idea that you can kind of access the full funnel in a well done interview here is pretty attractive. When we scaled from referrals, the questions were, why wouldn't a brand do this?

13:48Why wouldn't a brand? It makes absolutely no sense. Because at the end of the day, too, I was on the brand side before this. I got pitched by vendors left, right, and center. At Tabs, I'm sure as you know, as a vendor, you want to work with the Tabs. You want to work with the Garoons. You want to work with the Doc's Watch to add the logos to your website. So at Tabs, every single vendor wanted to work with Tabs. So I was on the reverse. I understand every vendor, you know, is trying to, we're the best, we're the best, we're the best. At the end of the day, I'm not here to sell you media buying.

14:18I'm not here to sell you stuff that doesn't work. I'm here to take your product and go have your exact demographic react well to it, edit it, and give it to you. Who doesn't want that? For those listening interested, what does your model look like? So they could, like, and then for what size of brand is this applicable? I mean, so we have packages from$5 ,000 a month all the way up to$25 ,000 a month, right? So we work with brands that are spending$50 ,000 to$100 ,000 a month on Meta. and we're going to brand spending 10 to 20 million a month on meta. So really just, you know, it ranges in all scopes.

14:47But if a brand has, you know, UDC content that's working, has product market fit, and is looking to scale with creative, that's usually, you know, where we kick off. We get brands that come to us all the time that haven't launched yet. And that doesn't really make sense. You should have some traction already. Streetalk.com. Any other key aspects that you'd want to highlight? Also, it's like the infrastructure and the complexity. to it, right? Like a lot of people are like, oh, it's just go down to a street review. I would have my entire bedroom filled with consumer brands. I lived in a TikTok shop.

15:19Then we got a storage locker. So 10 minutes from Washington Square Park, there's a storage locker with 250 consumer brands that you see all over your feed all day long. Then my production manager goes to that storage locker. He then puts everything on a trolley, wheels that trolley to Washington Square Park. Then we have 25 different hosts come to Washington Square Park, meet them, and they get trained every single week. Every week we have street talkers calls and we train them. And then we're basically making it so that this becoming a street interviewer is going to be a mainstream job in the gig economy, right?

15:53The nine to five is over. Corporate America is dead. But being a content creator is the biggest thing in the world. And now you don't need to have a Jake Paul level following to make money on social media. You can be you. You can be me. You can be my cousin. You can be whoever. You can be my dog walker and make money on social media, right? So going out and being a street talker is going to be a global jump. It's the same way you're an Uber driver, the same way you work at a fast food restaurant, the same way you go do anything. If you want to make$4 ,000 to$10 ,000 a month, you can sign up and you're not going.

16:22You could be a street talker in Brazil, in Europe, in China, in every major city, every college campus, everywhere. I mean, we're going to be a global powerhouse because every single brand in the world needs content and every single brand is a media company. So we're going to supply them with that media. Yeah. I think you answered the question too, about what, you know, what stops brands from doing this themselves. It's that scalability. I think you make a really good point. Just, I think it was eight hours ago, Block mentioned, you know, Jack Dorsey talked about laying off 25, 30 % of his entire staff because of AI, like humans are going to need to find new ways to make money and to be useful and like, and leaning into something just like human conversations, even if they're about, you know, about products, I could definitely see a big place for it.

17:04A hundred percent. And reaction content is the backbone of social media, right? So, I mean, that's how social media started was reactions. So this is going to be the content format that's going to drive engagement, trust for years and years and years to come. Red carpet, people get interviewed. The late night show. Interviews are what consumers around the world watch. We're interviewing people now about brands and the ads are absolutely crushing. Any insights around platform? We've mentioned meta. You mentioned TikTok a little bit. Any about rising platforms or the platforms? Does this work on Reels as well and Facebook and all that?

17:37Yeah. I mean, so these are mostly used for brand scaling on Meta. They need creative diversity. And Geromodos, you know, put up their ad account. They need creative diversity now more than ever. Knob's Toothpaste is one of the fastest growing toothpaste brands in the country right now. That actually has launched in 900 targets nationwide. We've been their top ad on TikTok for 15 months, for over a year now. They've been a client for. So they do work on other channels. YouTube, Clover. I'm not sure you know the fintech company Clover. they're running ads still to this day that I made for them over a year and a half ago on YouTube.

18:06We shoot everything horizontally so that way we can edit it for short from video as well as runs YouTube, as well as running on TV. We have brands running our stuff on TV ads. For sure. All right, DTC people, go to streettalk.com. Great domain, by the way. That's a good one to lock up. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really excited. And if you're a brand founder, shoot me a DM on Twitter. We're actually starting the Street Talk show where I'm going to be interviewing on a walk brand founders. So come and walk and talk with me. We're going to walk to Washington Square Park and then we're going to do street views with your brand and have you be the host.

18:37Because again, undercover boss. I do walk and talks every day. I take meetings walking. Walk and talk is such a good thing to brand around. I think you got something there. You should come and do it. Okay, I'm in. Josh, thanks for coming on the DTC podcast today, man. This was awesome. Lots of good info for everyone. Go check out streettalk.com. Hell yeah, Eric. Thank you so much.

19:02Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at directtoconsumer, all one word, dot co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC Podcast. We'll see you next time.