We all grew up with video games. Editor Pollice had PlayStation. Pollard had Nintendo. Capone had Atari. Mack had Pong. And Mandese - well, Mandese had a stoop and a ball, but the point is we all got plenty excited about the gaming issue. When we secured Mario for the cover, we could barely contain ourselves. Chatter around the office grew louder as the day of the shoot neared.

Sort of like a clown car routine in reverse, marketers are funneling huge amounts of cash into segments that are seemingly too small to accommodate the influx. Plans by General Motors Corp. and Procter & Gamble Co. to shift significant portions of their advertising dollars to the digital realm in the next few years are forcing many to ask whether the digital space is ready for primetime.

Media on the fly, in the form of interactive digital signage, is transforming out-of-home. While total out-of-home spending slowed this year, eMarketer says the digital sector shows sizzling growth, second only to Internet advertising. The research firm expects spending to total $2.25 billion in the United States in 2011, up from $1.26 billion in 2007, thanks to the convergence of digital, video and wireless technologies.

Even the platform's champions admit the mobile-gaming segment expected to surge in the United States has failed to materialize. Could advertising come to the rescue? Only 9 percent of phone owners ever play games on their handsets, according to M:Metrics, and far fewer actually buy new ones.

Pushing it, you open up the engine and let the car go, but it's not responding the way it used to. Getting tired of the 120 mph cornering performance of your track-ready BMW? Does hitting the far turn at 140 mph feel a bit sluggish? Players of the Codemasters racing game GRID hate when that happens. But now they can take that old clunker and flip it on eBay Motors. Yes, eBay Motors.