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March 17, 2026
In the spring of 2018, Matt Britton unveiled Suzy at South by Southwest with a pitch that was simple, specific, and slightly disorienting for anyone who had followed his career.
Britton had spent nearly two decades building one of the defining youth marketing agencies of the social media era. He had written a book about Millennials, toured three continents speaking about consumer culture, and returned to run Crowdtap — the influencer marketing platform he had incubated inside his agency and spun out years earlier. And now, at the industry's premier conference for technology and creative culture, he was announcing that he wanted to get out of influencer marketing and into data.
"The influencer space is saturated — there are publishers, agencies and ad-tech companies in it," he said in the Adweek coverage of the launch. "I think it's pay to play — you saw that with Logan Paul and the brand safety issues, and I think it will come full circle to be the traditional endorsement model versus a brand having 3,000 influencers share content for them. I think those days are over."
What replaced it was Suzy: a consumer intelligence platform that used Crowdtap's network of one million creators not to produce content but to answer questions. The B2B version of Siri, as the Adweek headline put it. A way to let brands run surveys and gather insights about consumers in real time, using AI to target the right respondents and deliver answers in hours rather than months.
Eight years later, Suzy has raised over $100 million in venture capital, serves hundreds of Fortune 500 clients, and operates in a market that has been transformed by exactly the forces Britton saw coming when he made the pivot. The company he built to solve the problem of brand decisions made on guesses and hunches has become an essential infrastructure layer for the AI-powered consumer intelligence category that now defines how the world's largest brands understand their customers.
The most instructive sentence in the Adweek launch coverage is the one that explains why Suzy existed at all, in Britton's own words:
"Through my 20 years in the ad agency world, I saw how many decisions were made on guesses or hunches, but a lot of marketers are out of touch on what's really going on."
This is an admission that goes to the heart of how major brand decisions have historically been made — and how often they have gone wrong. The brand manager sitting in a Westchester office, as Britton put it, making assumptions about what consumers in the Midwest will pay for a piece of clothing. The creative team developing a campaign in a New York production studio, confident that their concept will land with an audience they have never actually spoken to. The marketing executive approving an ad that will be seen by tens of millions of people, based on a combination of instinct, internal alignment, and a brand study that took six months to commission and four months to complete.
The gap between when brand leaders need consumer intelligence and when the research industry can deliver it has been, for most of the history of modern marketing, simply accepted as a structural condition. Traditional market research — the kind that involves recruiting research participants, conducting surveys or focus groups, analyzing data, and producing reports — operates on timelines measured in months. By the time the insights arrive, the decision they were meant to inform has often already been made, or the market has moved, or the window of opportunity has closed.
Suzy's proposition was to eliminate that gap. "This allows them to test any assumption they have instantly based on data," Britton said. Marketers could log into the platform, ask a question to a targeted segment of the consumer panel, and receive hundreds of measurable responses within the same meeting where the question arose. A fashion brand considering a new design could test consumer reaction during the design meeting. A financial services company developing a new credit card offer could validate the concept before any resources were committed to launch. McDonald's was using the tool to get feedback on menu items. TD Bank was testing it to push out offers. The average question received approximately 300 responses per hour.
The use cases Britton described at launch are now standard operating practice across the consumer intelligence category he helped create. The $140 billion global market research industry is being reshaped by AI-powered platforms that deliver the speed, targeting, and first-party data quality that traditional research methods could never approach — and Suzy was among the earliest and most clearly articulated visions of what that category could look like.
Britton cited Pepsi's disastrous Kendall Jenner campaign as the defining example of what brand decision-making looks like when consumer intelligence is absent. The reference was timely: the ad had launched and been pulled in the same week of April 2017, approximately one year before Suzy's SXSW debut.
The campaign was a textbook illustration of the gap Suzy was built to close. Pepsi's in-house content creation arm, Creators League Studio, produced the "Live for Now" commercial without external agency oversight and, according to multiple post-mortems, without adequate consumer testing. The ad showed Kendall Jenner leaving a photo shoot to join a protest march and resolving the tension between protesters and police by handing an officer a can of Pepsi. It was pulled after less than 48 hours, following backlash that drove Pepsi's brand perception scores to their lowest levels in nearly a decade.
The failure was not primarily a creative failure. It was an intelligence failure. The brand had made an assumption about how consumers would receive the ad's message of unity and peace, and that assumption was catastrophically wrong. "One main issue critics had with PepsiCo and the 'Jump In' spot was the lack of market research so clearly depicted in the final video," as one analysis put it — and the specific failure was the absence of outside perspectives in a creative process that had become hermetically sealed inside a single organization.
Britton's insight about fashion brands — that a piece of clothing priced for New York consumers might be too expensive for buyers in other parts of the country — pointed to the same structural problem, just in a less dramatic register. Brand managers who make pricing, product, and campaign decisions based on their own market context and consumer experience systematically misread the consumers they are trying to reach. The problem is not that these managers lack intelligence. It is that they lack the right intelligence — current, targeted, first-party data from the actual consumers whose behavior will determine whether their decisions succeed or fail.
Suzy was built to provide exactly that, at the speed of a business decision. The Pepsi fiasco remains one of the most studied advertising failures in recent memory not because Pepsi's creative team was incompetent, but because the failure was so entirely preventable. Any consumer research platform worth its name could have tested the "Kendall Jenner hands a Pepsi to a cop" concept against a representative consumer panel in the time it takes to have a brand review meeting. The responses would have been unambiguous.
The AI component of Suzy's original design was not decorative. It was fundamental to the platform's core value proposition, and it anticipated the direction of the entire consumer research industry by several years.
In its initial form, Suzy used AI to "zero-in on users to ask questions to" — identifying the right respondents within the consumer panel based on the specific targeting criteria brands specified. A fashion brand could ask questions of women who live in the Midwest and shop at Nordstrom. A financial services company could target existing customers of specific products. The intelligence, in other words, was not just in the answers but in the precision of the question-and-respondent matching.
The future roadmap Britton described at launch — AI that would trigger recommended questions for surveys, and AI technology that marketers could plug into their own applications — pointed toward what has become the dominant paradigm in consumer intelligence platforms: an AI layer that does not just collect and analyze data but actively participates in the research design, identifies the questions that would be most valuable to ask, and surfaces the insights that would otherwise remain buried in large datasets.
"We want other companies to build applications on top of the Suzy layer," Britton said, describing the platform's ambitions as an API-enabled intelligence infrastructure rather than a standalone research tool. "We're working with big hedge funds that are using it for analytical recommendations."
This vision — consumer intelligence as a platform that other applications and decision systems can build on, rather than a report that arrives in an email attachment — has proven to be the correct model for the industry. The HBR analysis of AI's transformation of market research noted that the $140 billion global market research industry is being fundamentally reshaped by AI capabilities, with investment theses from major venture firms predicting the same structural transformation that Britton was building toward in 2018. The company was ahead of the category's consensus on where the market was going.
The Adweek launch coverage devoted significant attention to what the pivot from Crowdtap's influencer marketing positioning to Suzy's consumer intelligence positioning represented. Pivots are typically discussed in startup culture with a mixture of admiration and skepticism — the willingness to change direction is valued, but the execution is where companies succeed or fail.
Britton's diagnosis of influencer marketing's structural problems in 2018 was precise and proved accurate: the space had become saturated, brand safety risks had escalated (the Logan Paul controversy he cited was one of the first major influencer brand safety crises, but far from the last), and the economics were shifting toward a "pay to play" model that eroded the authenticity that had made creator marketing compelling in the first place.
The Crowdtap network of one million creators was not abandoned in the pivot — it became the consumer panel that Suzy drew on for its survey respondents. The shift was not from one business to a completely different one. It was from using those consumers as content creators to using them as intelligence sources. The asset was the same; the application was different; the market opportunity was vastly larger.
"I think many entrepreneurs don't do enough listening," Britton said in a separate interview around the same time. "Listening to the market, customers, even employees. If you listen hard enough and put any prior notions aside, you can see where the need states exist and begin to reverse-engineer your business to deliver upon them."
The need state he identified — brand leaders making decisions on guesses and hunches, with no access to timely, targeted, first-party consumer data — was genuinely underserved by the research industry. Traditional survey platforms like SurveyMonkey, which Britton contrasted Suzy with in the Adweek coverage, offered self-serve survey tools but not the targeted first-party consumer panel, the AI-powered respondent matching, or the speed that brand leaders making real-time decisions actually needed. The gap was structural, and the solution Suzy offered was specific enough to close it.
When Britton unveiled Suzy with 70 brand clients including Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, Netflix, and Nestlé, he was describing a platform at the very beginning of a product and market category that would grow dramatically over the following eight years. The need he had identified — real-time consumer intelligence for brand decision-making — became not just Suzy's business but the organizing challenge of an entire industry sector.
Consumer research has been fundamentally restructured by AI. Platforms now offer generative AI that helps design surveys, natural language processing that analyzes open-ended responses at scale, synthetic personas and digital twins that simulate consumer responses for rapid concept testing, and predictive analytics that surface the behavioral signals most relevant to specific brand decisions. The speed of insight delivery that Britton described as Suzy's core advantage in 2018 — 300 responses per hour — has become table stakes for a category where real-time is the baseline expectation.
Suzy has grown to serve hundreds of Fortune 500 clients across every major consumer industry category, has raised over $100 million in venture capital, and has expanded its platform capabilities far beyond the initial survey-and-targeting model to include qualitative research, AI-powered analysis, and the kind of always-on consumer intelligence infrastructure that Britton was describing when he talked about brands building applications on top of the Suzy layer.
The broader consumer intelligence market has validated his original thesis completely. AI-powered market research is now described by analysts as essential infrastructure for brand decision-making at speed, with major venture capital firms publishing investment theses on the sector's transformation of the $140 billion traditional research industry. The Pepsi fiasco that Britton cited as the defining example of what happens without consumer intelligence has become a standard case study in marketing education — a permanent reminder of the cost of making major brand decisions without first-party data.
The Suzy origin story is instructive not just as a business narrative but as a framework for thinking about the relationship between consumer intelligence and brand decision-making — a framework that is more relevant in 2026 than it was at SXSW 2018.
The proliferation of AI-generated content has created a new version of the old problem Britton identified. Brand managers who once made decisions based on hunches and internal assumptions now risk making decisions based on AI-generated analysis that is fast, confident, and potentially as disconnected from actual consumer reality as the Westchester brand manager's intuitions about Midwest consumers. The speed has increased; the need for grounding in real first-party consumer data has not diminished.
Britton's framing from the original Adweek coverage — "this allows them to test any assumption they have instantly based on data" — describes the antidote to both the traditional problem and the AI-accelerated version of it. The brands that consistently outperform in a fragmented, fast-moving consumer landscape are the ones that have built the fastest and most reliable feedback loops between their decisions and their consumers' actual attitudes and behaviors. Consumer intelligence is not a research function. It is a strategic infrastructure layer — exactly what Britton was describing when he said he wanted Suzy to be the B2B version of Siri.
Suzy is a real-time consumer intelligence platform that allows brands to ask targeted questions to a verified panel of over one million consumers and receive measurable responses within hours. Using AI to match specific consumer targeting criteria — demographics, psychographics, purchase behaviors, geographic location — brands can test assumptions, validate concepts, and gather consumer feedback at the speed of a business decision rather than the months-long timelines of traditional market research. The platform's initial clients included Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, Netflix, and Nestlé; it has since grown to serve hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.
Britton identified three structural problems with the influencer marketing category in 2017-2018: market saturation with too many publishers, agencies, and ad-tech companies competing for the same space; escalating brand safety risks demonstrated by controversies like the Logan Paul incident; and the emergence of a pay-to-play economics model that undermined the authenticity that had made creator marketing compelling. Simultaneously, he identified a large and underserved need in the consumer intelligence space — brand leaders needed real-time, targeted, first-party data to make informed decisions, and no existing platform could deliver it at the speed modern business required. Suzy was built to close that gap using the consumer network that Crowdtap had already assembled.
The Pepsi "Jump In" ad is the canonical example of what happens when major brand decisions are made without consumer testing. Produced by Pepsi's in-house studio without external oversight, the ad depicted Kendall Jenner resolving a protest by handing a police officer a can of Pepsi. It was pulled within 48 hours of launch after causing immediate and severe backlash, with Pepsi's brand perception scores falling to their lowest levels in nearly a decade. Post-mortems consistently identified the lack of market research and outside perspectives as the primary cause of the failure. Any consumer research platform could have identified the problem before the ad aired. Britton cited the Pepsi fiasco as precisely the kind of brand decision that Suzy was built to prevent.
AI has dramatically accelerated and deepened the transformation of consumer intelligence that Suzy was building toward in 2018. Today's platforms use generative AI to help design surveys, natural language processing to analyze open-ended responses at scale, synthetic personas and digital twins to simulate consumer responses for rapid concept testing, and predictive analytics to surface the most decision-relevant signals from large datasets. The $140 billion global market research industry is being restructured by these capabilities, with major venture firms publishing investment theses on the sector's transformation. The core thesis Britton articulated — that brand leaders need consumer intelligence at the speed of a business decision, delivered through an AI-powered platform rather than a months-long research process — has become the organizing principle of the entire industry.
Matt Britton launched Suzy on the premise that the advertising industry's most expensive habit was guessing — and that the technology to replace guessing with real-time, AI-powered consumer intelligence existed, but had not been assembled in the right way for the right audience.
The brands that were already using Suzy in 2018 — running product feedback sessions during design meetings, testing campaign concepts before production budgets were committed, validating pricing assumptions against actual consumer segments — were building a capability that has since become the standard expectation for sophisticated marketing organizations.
The Pepsi fiasco, the fashion brand pricing assumptions, the Westchester brand manager who cannot truly understand what is going on with their consumer — these were not edge cases that Britton was using to make a sales pitch. They were the operating reality of an industry that had normalized decision-making based on insufficient data because the alternative had not yet been built at the speed, cost, and targeting precision that real business decisions require.
Suzy was that alternative. And the category it helped create is now the infrastructure layer that every brand with a serious commitment to consumer-centric decision-making is building its strategy on.
For the next evolution of this story — what consumer intelligence looks like in an AI-native economy, and how Generation AI's relationship with brands will reshape what brands need to know about their consumers — Generation AI is the essential guide. And for ongoing conversations with the brand leaders, insights executives, and technology builders navigating these questions, The Speed of Culture podcast is where those discussions happen.