• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 4, 2008

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?"