I would personally argue that the effect of the promo tour in the US outside of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles was slim to nonexistent, with maybe the exception of the Letterman nights (even their effects were limited). iPod commercials tend to be much, much better forms of promotion, like it or not. Although the stadium tour probably won't hurt things, if people react well to the new songs played there.
Europe might be a different story, though.
You have a point with the iPod commercial, but that sort of thing is an anomaly, and if you're going to base that as your benchmark of "sufficient" promotion, then every U2 album other than HTDAAB has suffered from a lack of promotion. NLOTH and ATYCLB's promo tours, for instance, are not dissimilar, and ATYCLB sure wasn't riding a wave from some digital music ad.
Promotion before but not very much after the album came out which is what I'm talking about. According to U2gigs, they've only done three performances after March 3rd (the U.S. release date) that included a NLOTH song. That's not a whole lot of promotion. I can't speak to the HTDAAB promotion after release but in regards to NLOTH just three performances after release isn't much.
If we talk about promotion in the US only, in the first two weeks of NLOTH's release, U2 played live seven times in the US, six of those on national television in the week of release (5x Letterman, Good Morning America), and then the seventh was a live set on national radio the next week.
By way of comparison, U2 did not play
once in the US on or after the US release date of HTDAAB, 23 November 2004. They played live on SNL the Saturday before its release, and in New York on the 22nd, both on a truck through the city filming the ABOY video and then under the Brooklyn Bridge - a gig that was not broadcast live, and only appeared on TV in abbreviated form later on MTV Jammed. The only other instances of U2 even playing live in the US in late 2004 are at the launch of the U2 iPod in October, and on 18 November 2004 at the opening of the President Clinton Library in Little Rock - at which no HTDAAB songs were played.
As far as getting the band out there playing new music in the US goes, the NLOTH promo tour sure had more than HTDAAB.
(my opinion, of course). 
is almost half over.
