Mario titles are at the very heart of Nintendo’s legacy of quality software. The original Super Mario Bros. reinvigorated the North American home console market, and the continued adventures of the rotund mascot have served as additional high points across the series’ 26-year history. When a new Nintendo console or handheld launches, it is assumed that a Mario game can’t be far behind, and some have postulated that the initially sluggish sales of the new Nintendo 3DS were due at least in part to a glaring lack of Italian plumbers in the system’s launch lineup.

With Super Mario 3D Land now...

I gave a talk last Thursday at the AppNexus Summit in front of a few hundred digital advertising types. The first part of the talk was a macro overview, but when the Q&A session started, all that anybody wanted to talk about was my take on online media. And given how granular the discussions over the course of the rest of the day were going to be, I wanted to push back a bit against some of the unexamined assumptions which I encounter most of the time when I meet online-media people.

It’s a known fact in advertising circles that only idiots click on ads — and yet advertisers still think tha...