Not even SpotRunner can monetize how much incremental income a business has generated from a TV Ad campaign. The fact is that it is nearly impossible to track the sales that come from TV-only campaigns.

And besides, SpotRunner probably earns a small mark-up for reselling a TV station’s ad time. If this is around 4%, they’re only earning roughly $100 on a $2500 ad campaign. They’ll need *a lot* of $2500 ad campaigns running simultaneously across many cable TV markets to earn enough Franklins to just cover their fixed expenses. I don’t think it’s going to fly. If/when it fails and SpotRunner misses the profitability that the VC investors are hoping it will earn, they will just liquidate and Google can snap them up cheap!

Selecting videos: Spot Runner customers have the option of EITHER selecting a video from the library for $500 OR using a video they have either produced themselves or procured from a third party. In other words, Google only lets you use external videos, whereas Spot Runner does that and also gives you the option of using one from the library.

Owning the ad: With Spot Runner, if you submit an ad that was created by you or a third party, you own the ad, just like with Google. No difference there. If you use one of the ads from the Spot Runner library, Spot Runner retains ownership of the template.

Controlling negotiations/bidding: Keep in mind that Google can only do this because they have essentially bought a large amount of inventory in bulk from DISH. Whether or not that is a scalable approach remains to be seen.

“You can buy local and national advertisers”: I’m not sure what this means – how does one buy an advertiser?

“All direct broadcast combined reach less than 17% of U.S. households”: This refers to satellite direct broadcast, so this one should be over in the Google column. In fact, Google can’t even hit 17%, since DISH’s 13.1 million households are less than 12% of all households in the U.S. with televisions (110 million as per 2006 Census data). Spot Runner can get you up to 13.1 million households with just Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Houston. Spot Runner also gets you both local broadcast and cable networks in most markets.

Also, one of the biggest omissions is the issue of geographic targeting. With Google you can either run an ad that displays nationally (or you can target specifically only Walnut Creek and Concord, CA – hardly a wide selection). Spot Runner will let you target just about any city in the US, and in many cities go one step further and target individual neighborhoods very precisely.

Overall it seems like you wrote this piece starting from the position that Google offered a superior service – maybe that’s not the case, but if you want to really do a fair comparison, you should include the information laid out above.