Last week, a company called The Department of Doing hosted the first-ever TEDx conference in New Zealand. One of the speakers, a guy from Microsoft by the name of Nigel Parker, focused his talk on reframing our perception of failure: in the absence of failure, he claimed, success is impossible.

Lately one of the things that's really gotten under my skin is the circular logic that you get as a search specialist working with some CPG advertisers. Maybe it's because I live search, but I can't believe after all this time I still find teams defending search budgets and answering the age-old question, "Why use search?"

When I write about controversial topics and get all fired up and make crazy, wild, sweeping assumptions and generalizations, I get a ton of feedback. Don't get me wrong; I love and appreciate that, but I fear today all I have for you is some cold hard facts -- and maybe one tiny bit of controversy.

Last week I asked for input on the upcoming Search Insider Summit. Of the seven possible topic areas I presented, the highest level of interest was in the role of human behavior in digital marketing. You, the Search Insider faithful, have made me very happy. But being an avid student of human nature, I feel it's only fair to warn you what to expect as you continue down this path.

Having just come off a great discussion about real-time search on an OMMA Global New York panel last week, I gained a sense that my co-panelists and I are as much in the mode of educating as we are talking about strategy (which is fine given the somewhat recent emergence of the topic in marketing and ad circles). So today I want to back up and talk a bit about the new R-word in search, "recency," and how an expanded definition of what we think is "real time" will also expand the real-world marketing discussions on the topic as well.

I've come back from getting married to find a cloud of red dust blanketing Sydney and a cloud of controversy blanketing that other cloud. You know, the SaaS one.

If you're convinced that the search engines have it in for branded content -- including branded news -- then I'd like you to consider the new Yahoo search. Specifically, I'd like you to consider the search filtering option from Yahoo's newly launched search features.

Every summer, millions of people take time off for the annual family vacation. Families take to planes, trains and automobiles in search of an escape from their day-to-day grind. Yet, during these tough economic times, many families have chosen convenience over destination. Fewer families headed to Disney's theme parks and more headed to their closest lake or amusement park. Likewise, high-end vacations such as international travel and cruises all saw declines during the past twelve months.At some point during 2010, this reality will come to search marketing in the form of the Bing-Yahoo merger.

From Dec. 2-5, in the ski hills of Park City, Utah, a bunch of really smart search marketers will get together to share what's on our minds at the Search Insider Summit. The almost seven months that have passed since the spring show in Florida have been interesting ones. I've taken a quick look back at the Search Insider columns in that time to see what things we were writing about....

In my last two columns, I've offered the following 15 marketing lessons learned from Google and examples of folks applying them. More than just tidbits to maximize SEM programs, these are principles that can be applied to all facets of marketing. Of course, the irony in all this is that Google is a company that's proudly spent very little on advertising. Accordingly, perhaps the most important lesson of them all is that marketing is so much more than just advertising.