Cyrus Shepard talks robots, chatbots, and influencer marketing

Above the Fold - Marketing and Laughs

Cyrus Shepard, previous Head of Audience Development at Moz and current founder and owner of Zyppy, joined us to talk about the latest news in digital marketing. We opened the conversation with discussion about some automated brick-and-mortar developments in San Francisco. Jeff had his first experience in an Amazon Go store, a weird, Orwellian experience to say the least. Then he went to a robotic coffee shop where all coffee is made by a robotic arm. Cyrus makes fun of Jeff for losing the the remaining human contact left in his life. We discuss voice search, where we are less worried about the trend for increasing amounts of voice-based searches, and more worried about complex voice answers, and featured snippets that are pulling away clicks. Influencer marketing brings us into a weird territory of ethics, again. We discuss the issues of quantifying results, and overall transparency.