WotC did buy a staggeringly expensive 2-page spread in Maxim and a few other magazines shortly after 3e came out. The ads referred people to playdnd.com, which got lots of hits.
Yes, these ads can be "staggeringly" expensive from out outright cash perspective, but they are usually very efficient in terms of the number of people, and potential players, that they reach.
Putting an ad in Maxim is not rocket science.
I agree. That's why it's surprising to me that they don't do more of this kind of thing.
Thinking back on what I said earlier, I think it probably still is important for WotC to support some of the more narrowly focused game publications (such as KoDT and InQuest) because, quite honestly, without ad support from WotC, a lot of these publications would probably cease to exist.
It's unfortunate, because I believe quite strongly that 99% of the readers of those magazines already know about the next D&D product (or, to carry it further, the next MTG expansion) that is coming out, having learned about it a long time ago from either the WotC website or from places like this website.
In the "ideal world" I'd like to see WotC forget about (or at least greatly reduce) the marketing dollars that they spent on promoting the game supplements & expansions and focus instead on more "mass-reaching" publications (meaning stuff like Maxim and computer gaming magazines) to get new players (or, as Finkin Swiftfingers pointed out, lapsed players) into the game. Then the 3rd party d20 publishers could use their limited marketing dollars to run ads in places like Dragon/Dungeon/InQuest/KoDT/etc to promote their new product releases, which would help to keep those publications in business.
