At the Kelsey conference focused on local search and local online commerce, the attendees had a chance to discover, an Internet-based ad agency launched last year and that makes it easy and affordable (less than $500) for businesses (small or large) to create spots and advertise on local television. "For Spot Runner we see ourselves as a full service advertising agency and we would be expanding the platform that we operate in over the next several quarters. You'll see Spot Runner expand in international television, into radio, into online video and ultimately into search and banners". Watch out Google!!!!

Here are some other interesting comments from Nick Grouf's keynote, the company's charismatic co-founder, chairman and CEO.

The average cost of a 30 seconds spot with a large agency is just about 500 grands... we'll personalise that ads for less than 500 bucks [...] Within 24 hours your ad is ready for review. Typically with a large agency you are looking at lead times of 6 weeks to several months to get it on the air [...] Our creative team will make more ads in a week than an agency will do an entire year [...] one of the member of our team was a co-writer of a film that won an Oscar 3 weeks ago.

Spot Runner attracts SMBs as well as Fortune 100s,

We're seeing tremendous demand from thousands of advertisers in thousands of categories in what we all describe as the SMBs, but we're also seeing very substantial demand from very large fortune 100 brands that are looking to use the hyper local targeting capabilities of Spot Runner to help move their message deeper into markets.

TV versus Internet, guess who wins!

Selling is divided in three steps: awareness, responding to customers' questions and the close. The Internet reinvented the close and Internet search presents an answer to all the questions you might have. But when it comes to this issue of awareness the Internet still sucks [...] TV is the most powerful way to build that type of awareness.

Americans are telephage,

The average American is going to spend 4 hours 15 minutes everyday this year watching TV. The average American household spends 8 hours and that number, despite the popularity and strength of the Internet to my disbelief continues to grow [...] What we believe is that there is a fantastic marriage between online and TV, and over the next 3 years we're going to see that final moment of convergence as we move towards IPTV and people move from thinking about buying media from a national perspective, to a regional perspective, to today with Spot Runner in a hyper local and molecular perspective all the way down to the household. And that will be a clickable environment, a fully reportable environment because of course we strugle with some of the shortfalls of Nielsen as TV exists today.

Did you say disruptive pricing?

$500 is not the gating item in fact we're pretty confident that if we want to raise the price we could. But we see no reasons to it - because they have great economies of scale with those spots that they can be reuse over and over in other markets. The pricing we're operating at is obviously fundamentally disruptive but what we're doing is working with very small businesses helping them buiding a quality advertising that is just not available.

A look at the future,

We're going to start let people use their ad online and helping people buy media in the online world. Looking at ways how we can intelligently place our clients spots to help them maximise the value of their video ads across all spectra of the video opportunity

Google is stumbling!

I think Google is stumbling in the marketplace not necessarily because they're reselling other people's inventory but I think that their relationships with the big media players out there are string. That is creating more challenges for Google than any issues with business models. I take issue that there's a problem with their model. But there's a problem in the way they are executing that model.

OK, a last one on Google!

After the YouTube acquisition last year, the perception of Google changed in a very fundamental way. People were very confortable to see them as a search business but when they acquired YouTube particularly the large media players recognised that what Google was doing was putting a flag in the sand saying that "your future is going now become mine". And they became competitive in a way that people just didn't see them as competitor. What Google is doing is unfortunately creating a sort of channel conflict for themselves and that channel conflict is more difficult in a traditional environment than in an online environment. Is Google a media company or an agency going out helping other people buy media?