I am sure that Ammon will reply to this post, and rip it all apart (waves at Ammon, "Hi, i think i owe you a couple of cigarettes from the Omega Sektor"), and say that I am hideously incorrect in how advertising works.
No, nothing really wrong there at all.
All I will add is that advertising and marketing are not magic. Advertising a bad product only increases the number of people telling others how bad a product it is.
Not that CoH is a bad product, but it is a specialized one. It is not for everyone. The very things that set the game, and its community apart are things that also prevent it being as 'mass-market' as a game like WoW.
People who are not very social often struggle to enjoy CoH to the full. Its a good enough solo game, but its strength, and much of its focus is in teaming and interaction. Lots of people are not very good (or even interested) in the social aspects. Lots of people play games to call others losers and be quite anti-social, and CoH is generally a poor offering for those.
The game itself, and its community, strongly reward creativity. The game actively jumps on people doing the obvious thing of cloning their favourite heroes too clearly. Lots of potential gamers are really just not that creative, or at least, don't have the confidence to enjoy creativity and expose it to all.
The game has no single 'right' way of doing things. In other games, which tend to be more popular, its easy for a new player to copy a walkthrough, or copy a 'best build' etc. They know for sure which is the 'best' AT, the best gear, etc. CoH doesn't have that simplicity of right and wrong. Right is whatever is fun and works for you and others you play with. There really is no 'wrong' at all, and that can frustrate many players of other games.
As I've said in a couple of other posts, CoH is not really a 'mass-market' game. Mass-market stuff usually appeals to the lowest common denominators - cheap; easy; fast; thoughtless. CoH is more thoughtful and quality oriented than most WoW-clones. We love it that way, but it means it is
not for everyone.
A mass-market game can spend X amount of money to advertise and expect to get more people who stick, and pay. CoH can't expect the same numbers to stick, so it is more expensive
per result for them to advertise. They know, they did try several marketing activities and most were quite miserable in results.
Add in that NCsoft seem to struggle to understand the market their game does appeal to, and certainly struggle with public relations (as the current crisis shows all too clearly), and their attempts at marketing are doomed to be expensive failures with the customers they need.
The best marketing for CoH was its winning awards, its coverage in the gaming press, and of course, word of mouth and personal recommendations, all of which CoH went out of its way to encourage. They helped advertise fansites, fan-fiction, they provided news you could link to, frequent events you could talk about, and rewarded you for referring a friend.