The entrepreneur calls it an "aggressive step" toward cornering the market on services for publishers that want to sell leads to advertisers. It took Matlick about a year to perfect the platform and line up publishers including PC Magazine, iMediaConnection, ClickZ and DMNews.

Madison Logic's LeadFocus provides lead-generation programs to advertisers and helps advertisers target publishers' readers. The platform offers a full suite of tools such as serving up ads, behavioral targeting, inventory management, reporting, analytics and lead delivery and management.

The technology relies on algorithms to place the correct advertiser in front of the perfect buyer, according to Matlick. Advertisers produce white papers, Webinars, and other research to use as marketing tools for attracting potential sales leads. Publishers can now focus on selling their own programs without having to qualify, manage or deliver leads.

Historically, the lead-gen process lacked automation and "ad-serving intelligence," Matlick said. Publishers that wanted to sell leads to advertisers would take a lead-generation order and hardcode it to their Web site and emails to capture potential leads. The publisher would forward the leads to the advertiser. A publisher that sold 20-30 different offers to advertisers would have a difficult time managing the process.

Think "DoubleClick and graphical advertising" versus "Madison Logic and lead generation advertising." The platform allows publishers to see the number of impressions, downloads, qualified leads and cost per thousand impressions (CPMs). And while the first round of tools focuses on publishers, during the next few months Matlick said to expect a series of tools for advertisers.

Matlick believes the market for lead-generation services exceeds the 8% to 10% of overall online advertising spend estimated by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). His reasons circle back to search. "A lot of advertisers do lead gen, but they do it via search through pay-per-click, Google and Yahoo," he said. "If you look at search, certainly a portion of the 47% spend is done for lead gen. At the bare minimum, it's about 10% of the market."

Madison Logic's initial investors include William J. Benedict, Jr., founder and CEO of Alpine Meridian; SoftBank Capital's Mike Perlis; Geoff Judge, an investor in early stage companies and an active member of The NY Angels; Mark Walsh, the chief technology advisor for the Democratic National Committee and former chairman and chief strategy officer at VerticalNet; Internet Capital Group's Ivan Inerfeld and Elke Wong, who serves as the company's COO and also former co-founder of Industrybrains.

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