Most advertising formats have a natural home and marketers generally sort them accordingly. Video suits e-commerce, display suits retargeting, long-form content suits considered B2B purchases, et cetera. By that same logic, since the format appears to depend on mass-market appeal and impulse-level purchase decisions, unscripted street interviews should suit consumer products and mobile apps and not much beyond that.
That assumption tends to collapse fairly quickly once someone actually tests the format against a different class of problem, however. Street Poller Media founder Shane Ginsberg has argued the applicable list runs considerably longer than most marketers assume.
Street Poller Media, the Miami-based agency that has built the largest operation in the category, has run campaigns across crypto, fintech, GLP-1, pharmaceutical, and cannabis-adjacent brands, alongside the consumer categories the format is typically associated with. That client mix already suggests the format tolerates more variation than its reputation implies. The more interesting question is what structurally limits it, and the answer appears to be very little.
Consider the underlying mechanism rather than the typical use case. A street interview establishes that ordinary people hold a particular view, react a particular way, or recognize a particular problem. That demonstration works identically whether the audience receiving it numbers in the millions or in the dozens.
Business-to-business marketing is the clearest example of a category the format has barely touched. B2B advertising has historically relied on white papers, case studies, and conference presence, all of which are expensive, slow, and easily ignored.
A set of street interviews demonstrating that ordinary consumers hold a particular view about an industry could function as a reputational instrument aimed at a small group of decision-makers, distributed through LinkedIn rather than paid social, with an audience small enough to fit in a conference room. The format’s cost structure makes that viable in a way traditional production never did.
Hospitality presents a different opportunity and one where the economics are unusually favorable. Hotels already have their subjects on premises, already having the relevant experience, requiring no casting, scheduling, or talent fees. Lobby interviews asking departing guests how the stay went produce testimonial footage usable simultaneously as paid advertising, retargeting content, and organic social posts. The industry currently outsources that credibility function to review platforms it does not control.
Real estate follows comparable logic. A new residential development competing against established buildings faces an inherently comparative sales problem, and interviews with people already living in the surrounding area, comparing their current amenities against what a new property offers, generate market research and advertising from the same footage. The objections raised on camera are the same objections a leasing team encounters in person.
While none of these represent campaigns that have been run at scale, they are clear extrapolations from how the format could work in seemingly unlikely industries.
Several structural obstacles are worth naming. Regulated professional services face advertising restrictions that constrain what any format can say. Enterprise sales cycles are long enough that attributing a closed deal to a specific piece of creative remains genuinely difficult, which undercuts the measurability argument that makes the format attractive elsewhere. Industries without a natural public-facing consumer touchpoint have no obvious place to conduct the interviews in the first place.
What the format does require is narrower than most marketers assume: a question worth asking strangers, and a reason their answer should matter to whoever is watching. It does not require a mass consumer audience, a large media budget, an existing social following, or a product simple enough to explain in fifteen seconds.
By that standard, the addressable set extends well past the consumer categories currently absorbing most of the spend, into any business with a customer, a guest, a resident, or a decision-maker capable of reacting honestly on camera.
