"...Mum’s no fool and she’d never shell out more money for less milk."

It’s generally accepted that a litre of milk gets more expensive every year, an unfortunate economic reality we call inflation. But can you imagine how angry mum would be if an additional $0.10 in price was inversely matched by a 50ml reduction in volume? This is all hypothetical of course because mum’s no fool and she’d never shell out more money for less milk.

But this is exactly what’s happening in the world television and press advertising. Less milk (audience) is starting to cost advertisers more money.

A recent article by Lara Sinclair in The Australian claims TV advertising rates have risen 63% since the year 2000. A further rate rise of 10% is being sought by some networks this year despite a 5% decline in audience numbers across the 3 major free-to-air networks.

And it’s not just TV faction wanting more for less; the inky finger folks are also in on the act. The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation report paints a sorry looking picture for press media with national newspaper circulation down 2.28% for the 12 months to December 2009. The main contributors being The Australian Financial Review (-10.08%),  The Australian (-4.2%), The West Australian (-2.69% Sat/-2.46% weekly) and The Daily Telegraph (-2.66%). With these kind of audience drops you’d think it would be embarrassing to ask for more money. Not so, a 3-5% annual rate increase is par for the course in the world of press advertising.

But asking press and TV media buyers to pay more money for less product maybe starting to wear thin.

The latest Internet Advertising Bureau’s numbers certainly suggest so. Another year of growth for internet advertising revenues, up 9% (2009 compared to 2008) clocking $513m for the 3 months ending December 2009, the largest fourth quarter result in the industries history. Where did this 9% come from? Certainly not from an overall increase in all media advertising spend, remember last year? It was horrible. The growth in online most certainly came at the expense of press and to a lesser extent TV.

There is no doubt that this growth in online media is partly due to the shift in media consumption habits; but there’s another force at play here, it’s called the online media revenue model. Put simply, it operates more fairly. The online media industry will never charge you more money for less milk. In fact many publishers won’t even sell it by the litre – hey you might not want a whole litre this week. “That sounds fair”, says mum. “They only charge me for the milk I drink, maybe I should shop there more often”.

Traditional media channels, particularly press, will continue to lose ground to online media (trust me on this one) but how long will it take before online media surpasses press in Australia? Paul Fisher, CEO of the IAB seems to think this will happen as early as 2013. Usually I find these predictions by the IAB too keen, the result of the youngest media channel getting a overly excited by some good early results, but this time I tend to agree. By 2013, press and TV buyers will have seen three years of increasing rates and reducing audience numbers.

Mum will have had just about enough by then don’t you think?

Came across this thanks to Barb Dybwad over at Mashable. Although the application of spelling your own company name in images from Flickr is fun for about five seconds, the idea of mashing images with text in general has some cool campaign applications.

Given the idea of personalising HTML e-mail campaigns with “Dear <Firstname>” is now the rule, rather than the exception, marketers need to find new ways of delivering personalisation to achieve cut-through and the ability to mash in images on-the-fly offers a whole new range of creative opportunities.

To give you a flavour of what can be done take a look at what the folks at Market United did for BankWest for a credit card campaign. They mashed prospect data (first name, last name) with images to create a highly personal HTML e-mail campaign where the prospect’s name appeared on the card.

So if you are thinking of new ways to personalise e-mail or landing pages then consider how you can mash pictures and words to add some wow.

There is a time and a place for the all singing, all dancing rich media ads that literally jump from the page, spin around and attempt to “cut-through”but let’s not also forget the gentle art of contextual web advertising – the art of making advertising “a part of the page”, something to read, not something to block.

This isn’t solely about disguising ads to look like content. It is also about taking a broader view of the publisher’s audience, what’s missing from their user experience and delivering an “ad” at the right time and in the right place in a language and tone consistent with the content they are viewing.

Hate to use the same old examples but probably the best example of this strategy in effect is Google Adwords/Adsense. The ads are visually similar to the page content, they are (often) content matched and form a part of the site’s function (the ads are search results from a search engine).

Now this may not sound like rocket science but it is a fundamental oversight in many of today’s online media schedules to forget the nature of theuser experience. We are often too focused on demographics,impressions, share of voice etcto take the time out to lookat what the ad will “mean” to the end user. Is it contextual, is it timely and let’s face it, is it useful?

Have it in the back of your mind when you get that next brief that sometimes to blend is to stand out.