Spot
Runner Eyes Millions Of Entrepreneurs With No Ad Agency
Spot Runner
has announced the acquisition of Weblistic, an online media company
specializing in search, and some display advertising. The deal is
part of a push by Spot Runner to offer a fully automated online
advertising and media buying system that anyone can use to create,
buy, schedule, and evaluate advertising on any medium.
To date, the
firm has focused mainly on television advertising, and radio to a
lesser extent, trying to develop online print advertising and media
buying systems for newspapers and magazines, akin to what Google has
been trying to do with print.
Nick Grouf,
chairman/CEO of Spot Runner, says the firm grew �500%� last year,
and now that it�s automated TV advertising model has been proven to
work, it is taking the next logical extension and offering the same
capabilities for online media.
�We will now
be able to offer a full array of solutions for our clients for
television media and for online media,� he stated, adding that Spot
Runner�s focus will remain with the smaller, retail, and mom-and-pop
type organizations that are typically overlooked by big ad agencies.
Although
Weblistic is known for their search expertise, Grouf indicated Spot
Runner would use that as a base to expand into display and
ultimately online video advertising. The team at Weblistic were the
same people who created
Yellowpages.com
before it was sold to AT&T.
An important
part of the new services would be Spot Runner�s ability to analyze
the impact various advertising and media buys have across integrated
campaigns, tracking the results from disparate media, as well as how
they complement each other.
�There are 15
million businesses in the U.S. Less than 1,000 of them are actually
served by the big agency companies,� Grouf disclosed, �which means
there are literally millions of businesses out there that have no
one telling them how to spend $100 billion on local advertising
initiatives. Who's holding their hands?�