• by Barbie Romero , April 7, 2026

Brad Neelan shares how search is evolving beyond a channel into a core business driver, touching on AI, real-time signals, and what it takes to drive meaningful results today.

Do you prefer brand awareness or performance? What is your preferred marketing channel? In this series, we get to know past Insider Summit attendees and ask about their preferences.

Brad Neelan, Head of Integrated Search, McAfee:

• Search as a Channel or Search as a Business Driver: Search as a Business Driver. Search has always been more than a channel. It is a deterministic engine for understanding market intent in real time, often before organizations realize what is changing. The value was never paying a toll for terms you already owned. It was reading the mind of the market.

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  AI-Enhanced Decisions or Gut-Driven Decisions: Both. Search sits at the crossroads of technology, data, media, and marketing, so AI-enhanced decisions are inevitable. At the same time, experienced practitioners still win by cutting through the noise and focusing on what actually matters. Curiosity remains the best compass.

• Predictive Analytics or Real-Time Signals: Real-Time Signals. The half-life of a confident prediction is now measured in quarters, maybe even months, not years. With the pace of change in large language models and search platforms, the advantage goes to those who respond to what is happening now, not those optimizing last year’s models.

• Customer Acquisition or Lifetime Value: Lifetime Value. When LTV is modeled properly, customer acquisition becomes an output of those economics rather than a cost to minimize in isolation. If you do not know what a customer is worth over time, you are not running a marketing strategy; you are running tactics.

• Search Informs Strategy or Strategy Informs Search: Interdependent. Search can be a powerful insights and growth engine when used correctly, but it does not replace the role of brand and creative strategy. Those disciplines give form to aspiration, emotion, and intuition in ways search alone cannot. The strongest organizations allow strategy and search to inform each other continuously.

• Experiment Often or Scale What Works: Both, simultaneously. With machine intelligence and strong data foundations, testing and scaling increasingly occur simultaneously. The brands winning today have automated the speed and logics, and teams still running tests the old-fashioned way are just keeping the lights on.

• Full-Funnel Marketing or Lower-Funnel Focus: Full-Funnel. The funnel was always a simplification; however, a full funnel means all marketing, really. People move across intent states unpredictably. Real impact comes from understanding the why behind behavior, from inspiration through experience and renewal, and valuing signals beyond the final click. The upstream signals often tell you more than any dashboard ever could.