Imagine this. You have a friend who works for a company that makes peanut and his / her sole purpose at the company is to sell their peanut butter. While there are quite a few peanut butter options there are a few market leaders that tend to dominate. The brand your friend has the laser focused responsibility of selling is one of the top 3 but has a long way to go. One day while visiting his / her home you have lunch and it is, naturally, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You notice, however, that instead of using his own brand of peanut butter he is using the market leader that his existence depends on its overthrow. You ask him “Why aren’t you using your peanut butter?” and his response is “I wouldn’t eat that crap!”, you gotta figure something is amiss, right?

In the all good things must come to end category Efficient Frontier is reporting a 13% drop in paid search spending from their clients which tend to be the big players in the search universe. This number occurred despite an uptick in March.

This is the second consecutive quarter of this trend. Since the previous quarter happened during the holiday season there may be cause for some gloom and doom. The WSJ reports that Google is still doing well and is positioned to whether this storm. Efficient Frontier Chief Executive David Karnstedt stated

Advertisers were in many cases narrowing their keyword selection to search terms that deliver the best bang for their buck, while no longer bidding on less efficient keywords, whose company manages more than $750 million in annual search spending.

Looking back at the past few months of posts here at Marketing Pilgrim it is real obvious what players dominate the search and social media landscape. I am not going to rehash those names again because you will likely read about one or more of them in the next post. One player that gets little attention is Ask.com. They are back trying to make some noise again but is anyone around to hear them?

Ask has been at this search thing for quite a while now. Now a part of IAC / InterActiveCorp the search engine has been around in some way, manner, shape or form since 1996. It even had a butler at one point . Now, however, it struggles to be more than a footnote in the search engine wars running a distant fourth in a three company race (despite seeing some increase in usage in March).