Wyatt Eiden
Group of students taking a selfie in front of a prize wheel with different dollar amounts on it.
Wyatt Eiden’s popular trivia TikToks are more about fun than money.
“What is your checklist for Mifflin?” the interviewer asks.
The interviewee — a UW-Madison student approached on campus grounds — delivers the kind of edgy and humorous answer the content producers are looking for. “My thoughts, my feelings, good vibes, cigarettes and my dignity.”
The bit became part of a short video a group of UW-Madison students made in the weeks leading up to the Mifflin Street block party as part of their brand Stranded on State (SOS), which produces content for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
These videos are better known as street shows, and they are popping up on college campuses across the country. In Madison alone, there are at least five regular street shows that feature anything from brief interviews to trivia games. Most of the creators are students; their subjects, also students.
The SOS team is composed of seven undergraduates with titles like “creative director,” “creative associate” and “social media coordinator.” The group comes up with questions to conduct street interviews once or twice a week, says Matt Shaw, co-founder of SOS. Content varies from open-ended interviews directed at bar-goers to questions about upcoming Madison events.
The goal is “to give the world a taste of college life at UW-Madison, and create funny, relatable content for every college student,” according to the SOS website.
Subjects are “not just gonna walk right up to you, you have to be a little proactive and go and ask them nicely,” Shaw says, as the team walks around finding interviewees. “It’s obviously a little awkward sometimes, but that’s part of the gig.”
The team doesn’t seek out specific people or answers. “You can never judge a book by its cover,” Shaw says. “You have to go around and keep asking and then you’ll find that golden piece.” When filming their Mifflin video, it only took the team a half hour to gather all the content they needed.
“I thought it was fun,” says Daphne Smoley, who was tapped for an interview. “I texted my friends and I was like ‘Guys, guess what?!’”
Creators are motivated to create this type of content for a variety of reasons. Shaw and Jake Jennings, his co-founder at SOS, wanted to create something that would make people laugh and showcase campus culture.
“We’ve been building the brand together day by day, and trying to see it through and do everything we can to cater to our target audience, which is other college students in Madison,” says Jennings.
Shaw and Jennings, both journalism students, wanted their brand to be different from other social media accounts, such as Barstool, that highlight campus culture. “We’re not corporate, we’re by students, for students,” Jennings says. But as SOS’ popularity has grown, they have started to work with different brands such as LineLeap and Fjällräven to create sponsored content. Usually these videos offer participants an opportunity to win free merchandise by completing some kind of challenge.
Street shows in Madison have also created a new way for students to engage with the campus community.
Wyatt Eiden is a UW-Madison alum who runs a successful TikTok account with more than 2.8 million followers. “My generation, Generation Z, was the first to grow up with social media and see people turn social media from a passion into a career,” Eiden says. “I thought that’d be the most fun thing to do ever, to do what I love for myself and for others.” When TikTok was first becoming popular, it was a new opportunity to start a social media career. Now, Eiden travels across the country in his van creating content.
Eiden started his account, which focuses on trivia, in 2021 at the Mifflin block party. “Everybody knows college students are smart,” Eiden says. When he began his trivia series, he thought, “I’m gonna see… how smart are drunk college students?”
Sometimes Eiden’s questions are trivia for money or prizes, like “Five questions for $5”; sometimes they’re more philosophical, like his recent question to students on Library Mall, “What color is a watermelon?” (Red? Or green?)
Not all street shows are as benevolent. As the trend has grown, so has the number of street interviewers that “ambush” people. Ashley Dureke, a senior at UW-Madison, says a group of interviewers approached Dureke and her friends as they waited in line for ice cream late one night. When she and her friends said they didn’t want to be included in the video, the interviewer complained: “Oh, you’re such a buzzkill.”
Dureke did volunteer to be in one of Eiden’s trivia videos because she had seen them and likes them. But even that experience was bittersweet, once she read some comments attached to the video that she found personally insulting. “I think it takes away from the lightheartedness of being in the video,” she says. “I wouldn’t have done that if I knew that’s how people would react to it.”
Many content creators secure consent from their subjects before posting to social media, but there are participants who will ask for the video to be taken down anyway.
“Sometimes it’s just because people don’t want to see themselves online. Sometimes it’s because of the bullying comments,” Eiden says. “Usually when I see those [kinds of] comments, I don’t turn the comments off, I remove the video.”
Participants in college street shows are often intoxicated, which can create a consent dilemma.
The SOS team always gets consent before they record, but if someone messages them later asking for a video they’re in to be taken down, they don’t hesitate to remove it. “We’re never trying to put out a bad image of someone or something someone doesn’t want,” Shaw says. “That’s not our goal. We’re trying to create something that’s funny for everyone.”
