Plugin & Wordpress Help Needed

This is a multi-question thread because I do not want to litter the place up with tons of separate plugin or Wordpress questions.

1. How can I insert my ads inside a post like the Best Deals of Today on Wise Bread | Personal Finance and Frugal Living Forums ? If you check out their page and about the 4th or 5th row you will see it. I would love to place a few really good ads on my front page like that, but none of the plugins I have found are what I am looking for. I tried the AMR Plugin but either I was not doing it right or it just wasn't working properly.

Wisebread's ad setup is really great because they have ads from various merchants. Does anyone know how to do this or is there a perfect plugin?

2. How do I make the images inserted into a gallery live? I want to create a favorite blogs page within my site instead of being displayed on my page as they are now but when I insert a gallery the links are not live. I don't want it to be a slideshow, as I just want a row of clickable buttons all the same size in neat rows and columns. Is this possible? I tried by putting in the link to each button, but it still did not work.

3. Is there anyway to wrap the text box around an image? I would love to be able to type all of my book synopses in a colored box like this lady does here: Nose Graze | Book reviews and blog tips However, she is a coder and did that entire site herself. I know very little code and even though I found a couple of plugins, they did not wrap around the photo, so I had rows of text making my page look crazy.

I would truly appreciate any assistance available!