In this post, I start getting very pie-in-the-sky, but it's in line with developing tech to make CoH as much a "casual hang out" as a MMO (which should help bring in advertisers).
This is a bit ancillary, as well. It's taking it from "simulated world" to also being "augmented reality."
iPhones and similar mobile devices have fairly decent cameras capable of motion video capture and real-time image processing (to a limited extent). An app to enable your mobile device to use bluetooth to ping other mobile devices carrying the same app and say, "the guy carrying me is so-and-so," combined with some image-processing tech to identify where people's heads are, could enable holding a phone up and seeing the in-game name tags and titles over a real-world player's head. Obviously, this would be a voluntary thing, used for "cool, I wanted to meet you IRL" situations; it must be turn-offable so people don't feel over-exposed should they not want to be recognized out of game.
Take this a step further, however, and you could allow people to take photos of themselves and input that into the avatar generator (to get body/build type) and build their characters' costumes around it. Why is this relevant, you ask? Aside from vanity "my character really does look somewhat like me" things, the app listed above could be further designed to use bluetooth to take from the viewed-person's mobile device the avatar construct and use image-processing tech to superimpose the avatar over the person's image in the camera.
Suddenly, the hero-view app allows us to look at each other through our phones and see our in-game avatars, moving as if in the real world.
Alone, this doesn't help attract advertisers, but it's a cool and fun augmented reality toy for social networking and meeting each other IRL if we want to. However, we could also "hang" ads in real-world locations, either with QR codes that advertisers can put into their otherwise-purchased real-world ads that would trigger special images and/or video in mobile devices using this ap to look at them, or by having locations actually recorded and recognizable by the app and putting virtual ads in them.
Truly ambitiously - this isn't likely to be realistic any time soon - if a real-world store made its in-game retail space modeled after a real-world location and set up the network in that real-world location to talk to mobile devices running this ap, people could look through their phones to see heroes who were there only virtually. Doing the reverse might be a bit too "big brother" esq for most people's comfort, as cool as being able to see "real people" walking through the virtual store might be. (This would involve cameras around the real-world store that placed the real world people in the virtual store.)
Like I said, pie-in-the-sky stuff, but amusing to think about.