Daniel Tejada is Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Straight Up Growth, a San Diego, CA-based marketing agency specializing in advertising and marketing on Amazon’s marketplace. His company has successfully brought many brands into Amazon’s marketplace and it’s grown significantly in the past several years. He and I both had the privilege of speaking at the Roth conference recently, so I invited him to join me on a podcast.

I wanted to query Daniel about the lessons he’s learned about effective advertising and marketing on Amazon. We drill down into competitive conquest issues, branding strategies, and the use of appropriate KPIs in the marketplace. We discuss the “love/hate” relationship that many brands have with the marketplace, the SEO implications (both good and bad) of deploying an Amazon storefront, new tools that Amazon is putting into the hands of brands to alleviate some of their concerns, and his views on Amazon’s recent closure of its Smile customer donation program.

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I was super-excited to catch up with Jeff Wald, a serial entrepreneur, investor, board member and author. I met Jeff many years ago, when he was a board member of Register.com, at that time a Didit client. Today he’s Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Bento Engine and Sonero.ai.

Jeff’s written a number of books, including The End of Jobs: Rise of On-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations, and I wanted to lead off our interview by asking what led him to write it. “I thought we have a responsibility to really look at history, to really look at the data, and really understand how companies engage workers,” said Jeff. “And if we look through those lenses — we don’t have a crystal ball — but we have a higher probability of being accurate. And that’s all the more important, as we are in the early stages of this fourth industrial revolution. And people are very concerned: “are the robots going to take my job?” “Is AI going to take my job?” And the answer to that it is ‘it depends.'”

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I’ve known Danny Mizrahi, Founder & CEO at Sunbird Messaging, for many years, and wanted to have a conversation with him concerning the imminent launch of his company’s new unified messaging app: Sunbird.

I’m a fan of this app (and also an investor) because, as Danny notes, it does something extraordinarily useful: giving Android users full messaging functionality when communicating with iPhone users. As Danny notes, “there’s this massive pent-up demand for Androids and iPhones speak to each other better: encryption, reactions, high-res videos, pictures, etc. And so we solved that by creating an app that puts any messaging app inside of Sunbird.”

That massive pent-up demand on the part of Android users to get full iMessage functionality — augmented by some favorable tech press — is driving the rapid expansion of Sunbird’s wait list, which as Danny notes, went from zero to 50K in one day after a November 2022 press event (Sunbird’s wait list is currently north of 120K).

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Omer Cohen is Co-Founder and CEO at Skeep, a Tel Aviv-based software company whose AI-driven technology delivers compelling personal experiences to e-commerce site visitors. Skeep integrates with many of today’s most important e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento, Amazon, Woo Commerce, and others.

Omer and I chat about how different kinds of shoppers require different personalized experiences and how Skeep provides customized user experiences for each segment. We delve into AI, and the degree to which smaller e-commerce brands can take advantage of AI-driven systems such as the one Skeep offers, given that they typically do not capture as much user data as larger brands do. We discuss e-commerce challenges that Generative AI — the type of AI used by Skeep — can be deployed against.

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Michael Seiman is CEO and Chairman of Digital Remedy, a NYC-based media buying platform. The platforms and teams help brands manage campaigns across a range of digital channels, including OTT and CTV. I’ve known Michael for many years; in fact, our offices used to be in the same building in Rockville Center, New York.

I wanted to catch up with Michael to discuss his agency’s evolution from a direct response ad network to where it is today and the lessons he’s learned along the way. We then delve into the current state of CTV as an ad-supported channel and the role that Digital Remedy plays in terms of providing marketers both executional functionality and comprehensive attribution models for this and other digital channels.

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Josiah Goff wears many hats. He’s a content creator, podcaster, entrepreneur, and is also Vice President of Product at Tune, a Chattanooga-based company whose technology powers partner marketing programs and affiliate networks.

Josiah has uniquely powerful insights into the entrepreneur’s journey; he reports that “only after removing the (corporate) safety net” was it possible to truly focus on succeeding on his own terms. He also notes that it was necessary for him to achieve a major personal transformation before being truly ready to start his own line of businesses.

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Marques Ogden learned a lot about leadership, teambuilding, and overcoming adversity when he played for the NFL, serving five years as an offensive lineman with the Titans, Bills, Ravens and Jaguars. But after being cut in 2007, going into business on his own, and suffering a severe business failure, he had to learn a lot more.

Today, Marques is a successful keynote speaker, business coach, podcaster, and consultant who shares the tough lessons he’s learned with the business community. He also heads up several mission-driven organizations, and I wanted to catch up with him to chat about them and also discuss how he helps people struggling with career changes.

RIFs (Reductions in Force) are very much in the news these days and Marques agrees with me that this unfortunate development has a silver lining for employers looking for good people. We discuss his approach to content development and how he chooses guests for “Get Authentic,” his popular podcast (“Get Authentic” is now globally ranked among the top 1 percent most-listened-to podcasts).

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Jon Loomer, principal at Jon Loomer Digital, is a Meta advertising expert whose site, jonloomer.com, should be on your visiting list if you’re doing any kind of advertising on Facebook or Instagram. While Jon does offer paid training programs on his site for “power users,” he’s been very generous with his extensive platform knowledge by making much of it available without charge to the public.

I wanted to get Jon’s take on how Meta is doing as an ad platform these days and also get his view of what seems to be the biggest topic in marketing (and perhaps the world) these days: AI. As Jon notes, usable AI (as exemplified by ChatGTP) is so new that its applications to marketing, advertising, search, SEO, and social media advertising are both exciting and largely unknowable at this moment in time. We discuss some of the possible impacts of AI in these areas and also probe potential legal and ethical issues arising when AI systems scrape information in order to feed or train themselves without attributing sources or providing traffic in return (as Google does).

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If you’ve worked at an agency or elsewhere in marketing, you know that it’s often the case that people just don’t get paid. Sometimes the client doesn’t pay the agency; sometimes the agency doesn’t pay the freelancer or the radio station (yes they still exist). Sometimes the coffee vendor doesn’t get paid — or the vendor does get paid, and fails to deliver the coffee! These types of disputes, because they’re small (sub-$10K), often go unresolved, which is a shame, because the party at fault isn’t held accountable (and therefore may feel emboldened to repeat the behavior in the future).

Michael Egenthal is the founder and CEO of Squabble — an app that removes just about all the friction from the traditionally friction-rich, confusing small claims legal process. Knowing how many folks at least tell me they got screwed by someone else in the marketing ecosystem (rightly or wrongly), I decided to interview Mike.

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Rich Goldstein is principal attorney at Goldstein Patent Law, a firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and IP (Intellectual Property) law. I’ve known Rich for many years — in fact our friendship extends back to the 1980s when we both attended Stonybrook University. Beyond running his busy law firm, Rich spends a lot of time speaking at industry events and also organizing them.

Getting some level of protection for one’s business idea or business process in the form of patents, trademarks, or other legal protections is crucial for entrepreneurs, but many may not be familiar with the terminology, so I asked Rich to walk us through these protections and how they apply to different business situations.

As Rich notes, getting proper legal protections for one’s intellectual property can provide enormous benefits to entrepreneurs when it comes time to sell their companies. Conversely, failing to do so can reduce the value of the sale and in some instances can actually be deal-killers.

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