• by April 15, 2011

Denver-based Booyah Online Advertising has promoted Troy Lerner from vice president to president. Lerner replaces Michael Shehan, who founded Booyah 10 years ago, but has long focused the bulk of his time on being CEO and president of Booyah spinoff SpotXchange, the online video ad network. 

Shehan will continue as Booyah's chairman, and SpotXchange may well be involved with Booyah in other ways as well. Shehan says that following the recent hiring of 20-year Procter & Gamble vet Bob Dees in the new post of senior vice president for strategy, SpotXchange will launch its own trading desk tools specifically for mid-sized agencies, such as Booyah, within a few months.

Lerner joined Booyah in 2005 from Avenue A/Razorfish, where he had been senior strategy manager. SpotXchange was launched in 2006 and split off from Booyah the following year.

Until Lerner arrived, Booyah had been a paid-search firm, and Shehan hired him to transform the shop into a full-service digital agency whose services now include display, email, social media and online video. "He came in to start the agency," Shehan said, "and has really been running it."

Shehan said he has given up his title at this point because SpotXchange's first institutional funders, who anted up $12 million late last year, "wanted to know the CEO was full-time."

With a global reach, as compared with Booyah's focus on the Rocky Mountain region, SpotXchange is now much larger than the company it spun off from. It is "six or seven times bigger from a fees perspective," according to Shehan.

While Booyah mostly does national work for locally based companies such as Dish Network, Vail Resorts and Qdoba, it has also branched outside the region to sign TeleFlora and Little Tikes. The agency said it has 30 employees and manages more than $50 million annually.

SpotXchange grew 400% in 2010 and will grow 300% to 350% this year, Shehan said. Also, it served some 600 million pre-roll ads last month, has 80 million to 100 million unique monthly users, and a third of revenues now comes from outside the U.S.

Shehan said that 18 countries were served on Thursday alone; a year ago the number might have been six or seven. He attributed the international growth to an increased presence in foreign countries, via visits and new offices, and the ad industry consolidation that has resulted in more global buying.