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?�