Spot Runner, the online advertising and media buying agency that has unleashed the power of Madison Avenue TV advertising for the "long tail" of the marketing world, now plans to do the same thing for
online advertising. Spot Runner this morning 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, Spot Runner has
focused mainly on television advertising, and radio to a lesser extent, and has been 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. Ironically, it is now backing into online and digital media.
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 said, adding that Spot Runner's focus will remain with long tail advertisers, the smaller, retail, and mom-and-pop
type organizations that are typically overlooked by big ad agencies. That should come as comfort for Interpublic and WPP Group, both of which are strategic investors in Spot Runner, along with CBS.
Grouf says Weblistic's platform would be integrated directly into Spot Runner's exisiting advertising and media planning and buying dashboard, and that any retail customer can utilize it to
create cross-platform campaigns directly from their desktop. Although, Weblistic is known for their search expertise, Grouf said 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.
Grouf says the development of an online video advertising
component will also be accelerated by its recent acquisition of Globeshooter, a network of independent film producers that will give Spot Runner clients video assets to draw from when creating TV or
online video spots.
Grouf adds that 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.
Even though Spot Runner's big agency investors have made their own deep investments in online search and
display advertising businesses, Grouf says Spot Runner's diversification represents no more of a threat to them than does Spot Runner's TV advertising services.
"There are15 million businesses in
the U.S. Less than 1,000 of them are actually served by the big agency holding companies," he explains, adding, "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?"