I tried to reply here before, and my computer froze. Fingers crossed...
Okay, first off, I have mentioned the possibility of doing this myself a few times, and kept meaning to start a thread on it. Since someone else has, I'll just post what I meant to here instead, for all of you to work with. I'll start by working through the options, possible and otherwise.
1) Print medium. Not possible, and not just for the reasons the poster above pointed out. As someone whose worked in the graphics field and studied when to submit what story, I am here to inform you that magazine layouts are decided three to six MONTHS in advance. Christmas stories get submitted in late summer, no joke. But what about reports on things happening days before, you say? They plan space for them ahead of time, I reply, and then the page layout people make it fit. Any ad we arranged now wouldn't show up till late winter. I think we all want things decided before then. That's magazines: newspapers are technically possible, but realistically speaking, would an ad there reach the right audience? No way in hell, so that's a waste of money. Same for radio: what version of it would work for us, we've already reached anyway.
2) TV. Heh. Don't we all wish. I don't need to explain this one do I?
3) Posters. We've got this covered already.
4) Web ads. Here is where we want to focus. Here, we can quickly and accurately send out a message. And by accurately, I mean we can focus where the right people are going. The ads can send people straight to relevant sites, or even better, a custom made one page site, as I'll discuss further down. We'd want to look at game sites first of course, but after that I'd like to see if the mass might of our combined efforts can't break in somewhere a bit more mainstream. If we could get something into the sidebar of the Yahoo home page for one to three days, that would be great, and we just might be able to pull it off. Baring that, some suggestions on somewhat easier to reach goals would be good. Don't undersell us before we start: we are mighty, so suggest the highest goals you think we might be able to reach. What's the point otherwise?
It's not necessarily that simple though, or rather, we shouldn't leave it at that. If we're going to advertise, we should also be prepared to quickly and effectively inform anyone who clicks on an ad. I personally would like to see a nice, graphic one page landing site for the ads to link to. Someplace where they can get fed a quick but effective custom packet of information, explaining what happened, why everyone's mad, why it's important, why it deserves to live, etc. Tim the Enchanters video should be embedded. A description of the efforts thus far that emphasizes how much we've achieved that no one would have thought possible, finished off with links to the petition, this forum, and maybe a few other places? Maybe a few of those emails we've been using could be put there for anyone who finds it to add their voice to ours? The site would not be hard to make, but I'm too busy with schoolwork to volunteer, unfortunately.
That's my input. What's yours?