Back to the Future of Advertising: Jesse Eisenberg on Rebuilding Trust With Strangers

Jesse Eisenberg has spent more than 18 years in digital media and performance marketing, starting hands-on in Google Ads and eventually leading growth at a $250 million-plus agency. He is now CEO and co-founder of StreetTalk, and his case is that advertising has looped back to where it began. Word of mouth gave way to celebrity endorsers, then to influencers, and both lost trust the same way. The one voice still worth believing, in his view, is a stranger who looks and thinks like you.

In this conversation with Adam Weil, Jesse walks through his first year leading StreetTalk as CEO: how he raised prices to match demand and restructured client contracts to keep them retained far longer, driving a 6x revenue increase in nine months. He also gets into the attribution problem chipping away at how the industry measures results, and the one thing about StreetTalk's process he refuses to automate.

Jesse Eisenberg is the CEO and co-founder of StreetTalk, a New York agency that turns unscripted street interviews into vertical video ads for consumer brands. He spent seventeen years at Tinuiti, a digital marketing agency, arriving in 2008 as an account analyst, scaling the business from $1 million to more than $250 million, and leaving as Chief Commercial Officer.

Along the way, he also taught search marketing as an adjunct instructor at NYU. He argues now that media buying has been automated to the point where creative is the last lever a brand controls. StreetTalk is the bet: street interviews across six American cities for brands including Grüns, Dr. Squatch, and PrizePicks, and Best New Agency at the 2026 US Agency Awards. What it all rests on is simple: people still believe other people.

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