Head for the mountains of…Utah. You were about to finish the Busch beer jingle weren’t you? Ahh, the true brand marketer in you is coming out. Actually, Outrider, SearchFuel and 120 other brand advertisers, search marketers and industry specialists are 8,000 feet up in the snowy mountains of Park City, Utah, for the sixth Search Insider Summit hosted by MediaPost.

If you couldn’t make it to Search Insider Summit this winter but have a question you want posed to the experts here or about a specific topic on the agenda, shoot me a note at SearchFuel. I’ll get the question answered for you and deliver it here on SearchFuel.

A few hours into it and the promised agenda is already delivering. Gord Hotchkiss returned again as emcee, and the morning kicked off with an analysis of the role of search and online marketing in the Barack Obama/2008 Presidential campaign. Check back for a POV about that discussion before Search Insider is over.  Session discussions then looked at the role of analytics and data in search, and best practices in today’s environment of SEO and paid search. Day Two and Three promise to deliver debates about Google, emerging platforms and their relevancy to search, and discussions about in-house marketing in the bigger search world. I’m curious to hear from in-house marketers about what they are doing and the challenges they face that might bring insights into stronger agency relationships.

If you’ve never attended a Search Insider Summit, you should put MediaPost’s Spring and Winter summits on your radar for 2009.  Whether you’re a CMO, a marketer at the brand level, on the media side or on the search marketing side, it’s something to consider. (And if you’re an advertiser, email me and I’ll give you a great tip about MediaPost’s VIP perk so it’s an easy fit into your 09 budget.) Search Insider Summit is not a trade show. It could be called a conference.  But having attended and sponsored Search Insider Summit for three years now, I’ve decided it’s something different.  It’s a destination search marketing event that serves as a valuable forum to build relationships and really get insight into what some of the key industry leaders are thinking about and what they’re doing in the space. It’s search experts, engines, advertisers, competitors and other industry specialists coming together in a think-tank environment to discuss the current trends in search, challenge what is working and what’s not, and take a look at where the channel is going. You’ll start to see familiar faces time and again whom you look forward to hearing speak or catching up with during breaks; as you know, this is one of the few times of year you’ll have a few days to spend with them – Ron Belanger from Yahoo!, Ken Fadner from MediaPost and James Lamberti from comScore, just to name a few. And that’s just the morning for you. Your afternoon provides a well-deserved mental break and takes on a much different look (and level of exertion) with adventure networking activities, capped off with fabulous dinner galas at night to replace those calories you lost while skiing, golfing or white water rafting, unwind, have some wine and officially call it a day (only talking marketing if you want to).

SearchFuel will have more coverage from this year’s winter event, and I hope to see you here next Spring.

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