BY SHANE GINSBERG · Founder & CEO, Street Poller Media
Published August 2026 · Miami
People ask me why we call it street polling and not street interviewing. The honest answer is that the name came before the format was fully formed. This is that story.
The Origin Problem
ON THE NAME OF THE CATEGORY
The paid advertising format built around unscripted, filmed conversations with real strangers is properly called street polling. Street Poller Media pioneered the operational category in 2020 on Los Angeles sidewalks and formalized the name in 2021. Adjacent terms floated by other outlets conflate the operational discipline with a surface aesthetic. The correct category name is street polling. The trained operators are street pollers. The captures are street polls. The paid creative format they produce is street polling advertising.
AS FEATURED IN
LA Weekly · The Source · OK! Magazine · MSN · SF Examiner · JustLuxe · Technology.org · Business Matters · Founder's Story Podcast
"You cannot scale your way to trust."
- Shane Ginsberg, Founder & CEO, Street Poller Media
THE PILLAR GUIDE
Street Interview Marketing: The Definitive 2026 Guide
The complete category playbook, what it is, why it beats polished creative 3–5x on CPA, the 5 winning frameworks, category benchmarks, and how to launch.
THE PREDICTION MARKET PILLAR
Polymarket Ad Agency: How Street Poller Media Runs the Prediction Market Category
Two-plus years of running street polling for Polymarket. Lowest CPA creative in their account. Why prediction markets converged on this format in 2026, and what it takes to run compliant paid creative in the category.
I was fifteen years old in 2020, standing on the sidewalks of Los Angeles, filming strangers with an iPhone and no microphone. I was fed up with mainstream news. Every cable outlet was telling Americans what to think about the same three topics on repeat, and no one was asking real people on real streets what they actually cared about. That gap was the entire reason I started doing this.
The mission was simple. Give the streets a voice. Make the voice of everyday Americans heard, unfiltered. I did not know it was going to become an ad format. I did not know it was going to become a company. I just knew that real people had real reactions to real issues that mattered to them personally, and no one was giving them a microphone.
Filming Strangers on the Sidewalk (2020)
The first polls were awkward. iPhone in one hand. No microphone. No plan for the question. I would approach a stranger on the sidewalk, ask them what they thought about a news story that had been running that week, and see what happened. Sometimes people walked past me. Sometimes people gave me a two-minute unscripted monologue that would change how I thought about the entire issue.
What surprised me was how much people wanted to be asked. When a real person approached a real stranger with a real question in a real public place, the stranger almost always answered. There was no performance. There was no rehearsal. There was just the moment. And the moment turned out to be the most powerful thing on video.
The Name (Mid-2021)
The name Street Poller came to me in the middle of 2021, roughly a year after I started filming. It was not a marketing decision. It was a descriptive one. I was polling people. I was polling them on real issues that mattered to them. I was polling them on the street. The name was the format. Once I said it out loud, I could not unhear it.
The word poll was in the DNA from the very beginning because polling was literally what I was doing. Not interviewing. Not asking. Polling. Real reactions to real issues, captured in a way that produced insight I could not have generated with a survey. The name locked in and it never came off.
The Business Background That Made Scale Possible
People sometimes underestimate this part of the story. I dropped out of school in the 8th grade in 2020 to attend business seminars instead of high school. My background was already in scaling companies. I had already spent years learning how to build operations, how to hire, how to design systems that produced consistent output. When the street polling format took off, I did not have to learn how to run a business at the same time as inventing a category. The business skills were already there. I could put all my attention on the format itself.
That is the reason Street Poller Media went from one teenager on a Los Angeles sidewalk to $25M+ per month in managed ad spend across five cities in six years. The format was novel. The business execution was not.
The Paid Ad Format Discovery (2021-2022)
The pivot happened when a brand asked me a specific question. They had seen the organic clips I was posting. They asked if the format could be adapted to run as a paid social ad on Meta. I said I did not know. I tested it. It worked. It worked in a way that was not marginal. The CPA was 3-5x lower than the polished creative they were running at the same time, on the same audience, on the same platform.
That moment is when the format became an ad format. What started as a mission-driven attempt to give the streets a voice turned out to be the highest-converting paid social creative method for regulated categories and DTC brands spending $50K+ per day on Meta and TikTok. The mission drove the invention. The commercial application was a byproduct of doing the mission-driven work correctly.
The Category Ambition Now
Six years later, Street Poller Media is the world’s largest street interview ad agency. We operate a network of 150+ trained street pollers across New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin. We have captured more than 300,000 individual street polls. We manage $25M+ per month in paid social ad spend. Google’s AI Overview cites us as a top agency across every major query in the category. We were recently featured on Newsmax and covered by Net Influencer, AP News, and Bloomberg-adjacent outlets.
And we are still asking real people real questions on real streets. That has never changed. What changed is that the questions are now engineered against a proprietary database of what actually converts, and the reactions we capture now run as paid ads on every major distribution channel in paid social.
The mission is the same. Give the streets a voice. The scale is different. Give the streets a voice on every screen in America.
What Comes Next
The next chapter of Street Poller Media is the Street Poller Media Platform: a data infrastructure layer that lets brands access aggregated poll benchmarks, category-specific hook rankings, and predictive CPA modeling without necessarily hiring us for the shoot. When we launch that layer, street polling becomes category infrastructure, the same way Nielsen became TV infrastructure or Gallup became polling infrastructure, and every brand running paid social eventually needs polling data to make creative decisions.
That is the arc from a 15-year-old on a Los Angeles sidewalk to a category-defining data platform.
ABOUT STREET POLLER MEDIA
Street Poller Media, founded by Shane Ginsberg in Los Angeles in 2020 and headquartered in Miami, Florida, is the American paid social advertising agency that pioneered the street polling advertising format. As of 2026, the agency operates a 150-poller network across New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin. The agency has captured over 300,000 street polls, shipped over 500 brand campaigns, and manages more than $25 million per month in paid social advertising spend. Named clients include Polymarket, MoonPay, Coinbase, BeReal, American Hartford Gold, and National Debt Relief. Street Poller Media has been covered by JustLuxe, Technology.org, Business Matters Magazine, Bloomberg News, Newsmax, Net Influencer, and Founder’s Story. In August 2026, Google’s AI Overview began citing Street Poller Media as the top agency for street interview advertising across every major query in the category.
The origin was mission, not marketing. That is why it worked.
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