As everyone knows by this morning, Spot Runner–the heavily-funded and once-hyped online-offline advertising agency–is being sued by one of its more prominent investors.

Ad behemoth WPP essentially paints an ugly picture of Spot Runner as the Bernie Madoff of Web 2.0.

It is alleging in a lawsuit that Spot Runner, in a “pump and dump” scheme, sold over $54 million in “secondary” shares to line its own pockets without telling WPP much, all while losing money, running out of funding and not building a sustainable business.

Here’s the background and also an interview BoomTown did with CEO and co-founder Nick Grouf in better days.

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On one of my many trips to Los Angeles (what can I say? I like to hang where LoRo* hangs), I dropped in to see Nick Grouf of Spot Runner.

As many might know, Spot Runner is an online-offline ad agency play that has gotten big funding and even bigger hype of late.

Usually, BoomTown runs screaming from such Web 2.0 dandies, but there is definitely some there there at Spot Runner.

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A source close to Yahoo’s thinking emailed and declared that BoomTown was misinformed and ignorant of the insider mechanics of high-level corporate wrangling when I suggested in a post earlier today that the settlement between Yahoo and Carl Icahn was perhaps not the time to break out the bubbly.

You know, because Yahoo’s stock is still moribund, morale is still low, Microsoft is still looming and the economy is still tanking.

Other than that, Yahoo sources wanted to let me know the Icahn truce was a win.

And that is absolutely true, technically speaking.

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Could the new and improved Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang actually manage to beat back the proxy fight being waged against him by activist investor Carl Icahn?

It increasingly looks that way, with only 12 days to go until Yahoo’s annual meeting on August 1.

But exactly which Yang will be running Yahoo, if he does win, is probably the most important question shareholders need to ask.

Would that be the seemingly energetic Yang of the past two weeks, invigorated by the battle with Icahn and his new best friend and Yahoo foe, Microsoft?

Or will it be the other Yang?

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Spot Runner, the online ad agency, delivered yet another Web 2.0 miracle today, raising another $51 million in funding from a diverse group of investors.
Among other services, Spot Runner makes and places low-cost television and radio ads for small businesses and is trying to bridge the gap between the traditional and online ad market.
In this [...]

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