Yeah, Those are pretty cool. To be honest, I never noticed the Ads. At all. Ever. Not very effective for me I guess.
If I have my druthers, ads as a revenue source in MMOs will evolve to include both "product placement" at its simplest (the car on the street might just be the newest model from Chevy; Doctor Dogooder might be drinking Tab when he gives you your mission) unobtrusive form, but should also have some level of interactivity that is voluntary on the players' part. See an ad for some real-world company on a billboard? Maybe if you click on it, you'll get a neat little costume bit paid for by that sponsor as part of their ad campaign. Or maybe a piece of base decoration. There's a company called "blinds.com" that sells its blinds online, and prides itself on its system for interacting with customers over the phone and helping them plan window dressings through video-phone; if they were a sponsor, they might have a mini-mission or ap for doing just that to put a special "blinds" item into your living space. If you're really interested in the product, we might have an optional interaction that would give you a discount code to use on their site.
Sponsors would thus be paying to add bits of content to the game, and would be doing it only as obtrusively as players wanted to interact with. Look around your house and at the clothes people wear on the street; logos are everywhere. Today's fashions tend towards making them stylish enough to blend in, but there are a few who bling them up like NASCAR drivers; both should be options, and ways to help make the game profitable enough to sustain itself while minimizing real costs to our players.
A lot of the problem CoH had was their model for paying for ads. We can do a combination of mechanisms, from modeling billboard ad prices on how it's done IRL (location location location!) to having optional interaction with the players (which helps the sponsor get a feel for how much people are paying attention to their ads, and makes sponsorship with us all the more attractive), to facilitating connecting people who WANT something with the supplier (convenience for all involved when the advertising works).
Above all, it must NOT be obtrusive any more than it is IRL. Maybe even less so. MMOs are a medium unique from TV, print, or RL locations or radio, but they have elements of each, and any use of ads in MMOs needs to recognize this. Ads in MMOs need to use the power of being an interactive medium while avoiding being an obnoxious interruption of the play experience. Like TV and movies, product placement can help. Like radio spots, interaction to get a discount code can help sponsors track the effectiveness of their ads. Like billboards and other public locations, ads can be charged for by their placement in the world. The interactivity can be made into an easter egg hunt of its own, and get sponsors still more information while not getting in the way of the game play for the player. MMOs are a gathering place with some unique and powerful tools to enhance the interaction of those gathered there. They're a virtual town square combined with a theme park and a hangout joint.
Tl;dr: Ads need not be obnoxious, and most of the innovation in making them work goes into both enhancing the play experience (rather than detracting from it) while making it MORE attractive as a metric-provider to sponsors without intruding on the players in ways they dislike. Loads of purely optional interaction combined with low-level everyday presence akin to what one sees in the real world.
