Matt Rosenberg, group director, media and entertainment at Organic, cuts to the chase: "Why do we assume that just because it's a new format, people care? No consumer in the world is looking to interact with the next ad format."

Addante at Rubicon adds, "I think because people are so focused on integration and making these things work, they're spending less time on the creative element. The content has to be compelling. People are missing that point. At the end of the day, consumers don't care about the technology behind it -- they care about the content."

How about a marketing campaign that successfully embraces rich media, video and widget functionality? Now that would be interesting. Fortunately for media companies -- especially of the theatrical and sports genres -- their content is already well-suited to take advantage of those intersections. iMedia covered an exemplary Paramount Vantage campaign here.

Clearspring, a leading widget distribution platform, has rich media-enabled campaigns in progress with Sundance and TLC (Ford Sync and Bravo are launching shortly), but no word yet on how they're performing.

And yet as long as we're talking about CTRs in the order of a couple of percentage points, I still feel like we're missing out on a major creative opportunity. Targeting is better than it's ever been, we know more than we've ever known about who is seeing our ads, we can create any iteration of experiences, but is that the best we can do with 300x250 or 728x90 pixels?