A street interview ad that introduces a product to a stranger may never receive credit for the sale that follows days later. StreetTalk, a New York-based creative studio that produces the format, has spent the past year building the methodology to track what standard attribution misses. The result is the “Authentic Generated Content Benchmark 2026,” the company’s first cross-account performance study comparing its street interview creative against each brand’s own prospecting ads running in the same Meta accounts over the same period.
Founded in December 2025, StreetTalk produces what it calls “authentic generated content” (AGC) for consumer and DTC brands: unscripted video in which real passersby encounter and react to a client’s product on camera, with no actors, no scripted lines, and no paid talking points. “I was not convinced humans would succumb to spending their time watching AI-generated content,” says Jesse Eisenberg, StreetTalk’s co-founder and CEO. “Reality TV has proven this type of content has real lasting power.”
Building the case required someone with the measurement credentials to sustain it. Enter Brayden Cruz, StreetTalk’s VP of Creative Science and Client Success, who joined in July 2026 after more than two years at Northbeam, a D2C attribution firm. His career client list spans Lululemon, SiriusXM, and AG1.
Across the benchmark’s study window, August 2025 through August 2026, $2.07 million in StreetTalk media spend was tracked against 58.4 million people reached and an observed $8.29 million in new-customer revenue, a 4x observed return.
Platform Attribution Was Designed for Conversion, Not Discovery
The benchmark’s core argument rests on a structural feature of Meta’s default attribution: most accounts run on a seven-day click, one-day view window. A consumer who encounters a street interview ad and purchases 25 hours later, through branded search or a retargeting ad, shows as a conversion for those downstream channels. The street interview ad that started the journey records nothing. “If you are relying on the ad platform that’s taking your money to grade your homework, you are already putting yourself in a position of failure,” Brayden says.
The report publishes StreetTalk’s own in-platform numbers directly. Platform-reported ROAS was 0.61 times the comparison creative in the median account, and cost per acquisition was 1.68 times higher. Publishing those figures was intentional. Brayden’s argument is that they only mislead when read without the new-customer evidence that last-click attribution cannot capture. He also notes that the format does not produce a strong result in every account. “I’ll be frank. It’s not a great story every single time,” he says. “But overwhelmingly, in the majority, it tends to be.”
To connect StreetTalk spend to business outcomes the attribution window misses, according to Brayden, the benchmark applies logarithmic correlation analysis rather than linear, drawing a curved trend line through the data that accounts for confounding factors including CPM fluctuations, promotional calendars, and other concurrent activity in the account. “Most folks are unfamiliar with anything other than linear correlation, which does not do a great job of accounting for those factors,” he explains.
AGC Generates Demand. UGC Captures It.
One of the benchmark’s central framing moves is a distinction Jesse considers widely misunderstood: authentic generated content and user-generated content are not variants of the same format. UGC, in his framing, is performance creative designed to convert someone already in consideration. AGC is built for an earlier moment, when the viewer has never heard of the product.
“People know what to expect when they stop their scroll for a creator in their bedroom talking about a product that just ‘changed their life,'” Jesse says. “With AGC, you don’t know what to expect when you stop scrolling.” That unpredictability, the report argues, is what prompts algorithmic distribution to people the account has not previously reached. Because the creative earns disproportionate early attention, it triggers algorithmic extension, reaching new audiences at CPMs that Jesse says are often lower than other assets in the account.
The implication for measurement is that evaluating AGC against cost-per-acquisition figures from last-click attribution is a category error. “AGC is not UGC. They are complementary formats that achieve different objectives,” Jesse says.
2.79x More Unique Viewers Per Impression, Across All Nine Categories
In the median account, StreetTalk creative delivered 2.79 times the first-time impression rate of the account’s other prospecting creative, coming out ahead in 91% of accounts. The metric (de-duplicated reach divided by impressions within a matched window) measures the share of delivery landing on people the brand has not already reached.
The advantage held across all nine product categories in the study. Apps and digital services saw the highest multiple at 6.49x. Apparel and accessories, home and household, health and family, and pet categories each outperformed in every single account. Beauty and personal care, the narrowest result, still came in at 1.84x, ahead in 88% of accounts. The finding held at every budget tier. Accounts running committed programs at $50,000 or more in StreetTalk media still outperformed their own prospecting creative at 2.32 times, ahead in 90% of cases.
Hook rate was 2.17 times the comparison in 91% of accounts, and hold rate was 1.93 times, ahead in 76% of accounts. “Almost three times more people that are net new will see that ad per ad unit than anything else that you’re running in your account,” Brayden says. “That’s a huge number when you’re talking about dollars in versus dollars out in the age of CPMs increasing.”
Revenue Keeps Climbing After the Flight Ends
Analyzing accounts where StreetTalk ran as a clearly bounded flight with 28 days of account history on either side, the study found daily revenue 17% higher during the flight and 33% higher in the 28 days after. Daily purchases rose 14% during the flight and 32% afterward. Advertising spend rose 4% during the flight, meaning revenue grew roughly four times as fast as media investment in that period.
Brayden attributes this to the distance between a potential customer’s first exposure to an AGC ad and the moment of purchase, which often occurs through a different channel and outside the platform’s attribution window. “For folks who continue and don’t pause, they typically see a compounding effect,” he says. “The same way interest works, every single day that you have StreetTalk ads in the account, you’re seeing more and more daily new customer revenue volume.”
One anonymized consumer brand in the report illustrates the scale. On $180,000 in StreetTalk media, monthly new-customer revenue climbed from $385,000 before the flight to $612,000 at its end, and then to $1.31 million in the months that followed, a 241% increase against the pre-campaign baseline.
Human Reaction Is the Asset Synthetic Feeds Cannot Replicate
As AI-generated and templated content continues to fill digital feeds, Jesse’s argument is that unscripted human reaction becomes more valuable as a media signal, not less. He does not position AGC as the only format a brand needs. “I’m confident there will be plenty of space for authentic creative, AI creative, as well as many of the other formats we know today,” he says. His claim is narrower: for demand generation, for the moment before a consumer knows a brand exists, the format occupies a lane that performance creative does not.
The benchmark is StreetTalk’s effort to define what measuring that lane looks like, and to establish a cross-account standard before one is imposed by default. The company has extended the format beyond consumer DTC into B2B contexts under the name “EventTalk,” which sends crews to industry conferences to capture conversations where professional audiences are concentrated. For Jesse, the more important outcome is the ability to evaluate AGC on metrics that track the beginning of the customer journey rather than only its end.
“You would have never entered their consideration or their algorithm if we didn’t initially grab their attention and educate them about your brand or product,” he says.
Cecilia Carloni, Interview Manager at Influence Weekly and writer for NetInfluencer. Coming from beautiful Argentina, Ceci has spent years chatting with big names in the influencer world, making friends and learning insider info along the way. When she’s not deep in interviews or writing, she's enjoying life with her two daughters. Ceci’s stories give a peek behind the curtain of influencer life, sharing the real and interesting tales from her many conversations with movers and shakers in the space.
A street interview ad that introduces a product to a stranger may never receive credit for the sale that follows days later. StreetTalk, a New York-based creative studio that produces the format, has spent the past year building the methodology to track what standard attribution misses. The result is the “Authentic Generated Content Benchmark 2026,” the company’s first cross-account performance study comparing its street interview creative against each brand’s own prospecting ads running in the same Meta accounts over the same period.
Founded in December 2025, StreetTalk produces what it calls “authentic generated content” (AGC) for consumer and DTC brands: unscripted video in which real passersby encounter and react to a client’s product on camera, with no actors, no scripted lines, and no paid talking points. “I was not convinced humans would succumb to spending their time watching AI-generated content,” says Jesse Eisenberg, StreetTalk’s co-founder and CEO. “Reality TV has proven this type of content has real lasting power.”
Building the case required someone with the measurement credentials to sustain it. Enter Brayden Cruz, StreetTalk’s VP of Creative Science and Client Success, who joined in July 2026 after more than two years at Northbeam, a D2C attribution firm. His career client list spans Lululemon, SiriusXM, and AG1.
Across the benchmark’s study window, August 2025 through August 2026, $2.07 million in StreetTalk media spend was tracked against 58.4 million people reached and an observed $8.29 million in new-customer revenue, a 4x observed return.
Platform Attribution Was Designed for Conversion, Not Discovery
The benchmark’s core argument rests on a structural feature of Meta’s default attribution: most accounts run on a seven-day click, one-day view window. A consumer who encounters a street interview ad and purchases 25 hours later, through branded search or a retargeting ad, shows as a conversion for those downstream channels. The street interview ad that started the journey records nothing. “If you are relying on the ad platform that’s taking your money to grade your homework, you are already putting yourself in a position of failure,” Brayden says.
The report publishes StreetTalk’s own in-platform numbers directly. Platform-reported ROAS was 0.61 times the comparison creative in the median account, and cost per acquisition was 1.68 times higher. Publishing those figures was intentional. Brayden’s argument is that they only mislead when read without the new-customer evidence that last-click attribution cannot capture. He also notes that the format does not produce a strong result in every account. “I’ll be frank. It’s not a great story every single time,” he says. “But overwhelmingly, in the majority, it tends to be.”
To connect StreetTalk spend to business outcomes the attribution window misses, according to Brayden, the benchmark applies logarithmic correlation analysis rather than linear, drawing a curved trend line through the data that accounts for confounding factors including CPM fluctuations, promotional calendars, and other concurrent activity in the account. “Most folks are unfamiliar with anything other than linear correlation, which does not do a great job of accounting for those factors,” he explains.
AGC Generates Demand. UGC Captures It.
One of the benchmark’s central framing moves is a distinction Jesse considers widely misunderstood: authentic generated content and user-generated content are not variants of the same format. UGC, in his framing, is performance creative designed to convert someone already in consideration. AGC is built for an earlier moment, when the viewer has never heard of the product.
“People know what to expect when they stop their scroll for a creator in their bedroom talking about a product that just ‘changed their life,'” Jesse says. “With AGC, you don’t know what to expect when you stop scrolling.” That unpredictability, the report argues, is what prompts algorithmic distribution to people the account has not previously reached. Because the creative earns disproportionate early attention, it triggers algorithmic extension, reaching new audiences at CPMs that Jesse says are often lower than other assets in the account.
The implication for measurement is that evaluating AGC against cost-per-acquisition figures from last-click attribution is a category error. “AGC is not UGC. They are complementary formats that achieve different objectives,” Jesse says.
2.79x More Unique Viewers Per Impression, Across All Nine Categories
In the median account, StreetTalk creative delivered 2.79 times the first-time impression rate of the account’s other prospecting creative, coming out ahead in 91% of accounts. The metric (de-duplicated reach divided by impressions within a matched window) measures the share of delivery landing on people the brand has not already reached.
The advantage held across all nine product categories in the study. Apps and digital services saw the highest multiple at 6.49x. Apparel and accessories, home and household, health and family, and pet categories each outperformed in every single account. Beauty and personal care, the narrowest result, still came in at 1.84x, ahead in 88% of accounts. The finding held at every budget tier. Accounts running committed programs at $50,000 or more in StreetTalk media still outperformed their own prospecting creative at 2.32 times, ahead in 90% of cases.
Hook rate was 2.17 times the comparison in 91% of accounts, and hold rate was 1.93 times, ahead in 76% of accounts. “Almost three times more people that are net new will see that ad per ad unit than anything else that you’re running in your account,” Brayden says. “That’s a huge number when you’re talking about dollars in versus dollars out in the age of CPMs increasing.”
Revenue Keeps Climbing After the Flight Ends
Analyzing accounts where StreetTalk ran as a clearly bounded flight with 28 days of account history on either side, the study found daily revenue 17% higher during the flight and 33% higher in the 28 days after. Daily purchases rose 14% during the flight and 32% afterward. Advertising spend rose 4% during the flight, meaning revenue grew roughly four times as fast as media investment in that period.
Brayden attributes this to the distance between a potential customer’s first exposure to an AGC ad and the moment of purchase, which often occurs through a different channel and outside the platform’s attribution window. “For folks who continue and don’t pause, they typically see a compounding effect,” he says. “The same way interest works, every single day that you have StreetTalk ads in the account, you’re seeing more and more daily new customer revenue volume.”
One anonymized consumer brand in the report illustrates the scale. On $180,000 in StreetTalk media, monthly new-customer revenue climbed from $385,000 before the flight to $612,000 at its end, and then to $1.31 million in the months that followed, a 241% increase against the pre-campaign baseline.
Human Reaction Is the Asset Synthetic Feeds Cannot Replicate
As AI-generated and templated content continues to fill digital feeds, Jesse’s argument is that unscripted human reaction becomes more valuable as a media signal, not less. He does not position AGC as the only format a brand needs. “I’m confident there will be plenty of space for authentic creative, AI creative, as well as many of the other formats we know today,” he says. His claim is narrower: for demand generation, for the moment before a consumer knows a brand exists, the format occupies a lane that performance creative does not.
The benchmark is StreetTalk’s effort to define what measuring that lane looks like, and to establish a cross-account standard before one is imposed by default. The company has extended the format beyond consumer DTC into B2B contexts under the name “EventTalk,” which sends crews to industry conferences to capture conversations where professional audiences are concentrated. For Jesse, the more important outcome is the ability to evaluate AGC on metrics that track the beginning of the customer journey rather than only its end.
“You would have never entered their consideration or their algorithm if we didn’t initially grab their attention and educate them about your brand or product,” he says.
Image source: StreetTalk
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