But the Los Angeles company has been getting more attention for the ongoing $13 million lawsuit brought against it by former backer WPP Group. Last month, WPP filed an amended complaint after a judge dismissed the suit. With Malibu ready for the light of day, Spot Runner hopes to show that it has not been distracted by the legal conflict and that its relationships with other agencies and sellers are secure.

SEE ALSO: Court Dismisses WPP’s $13 Million Lawsuit Against Spot Runner; WPP Plans To Appeal

Otherwise, the timing isn’t as bad as it could have been. The cable ad industry it primarily caters to is more healthy than other media categories, and the general ad market is looking less worse than it did last year. Also, the mainstreaming of ad exchanges has gotten traditional media buyers more open to the notion of online, automated ad sales.

As for automation, Spot Runner believes Malibu can challenge Google (NSDQ: GOOG) TV Ads, which remains fairly limited in terms of the inventory sold on its system. In a conversation with paidContent, Spot Runner media platform GM Gus Warren said, “We don’t have the kind of sales conflicts that Google does. Spot Runner doesn’t own a site like YouTube, so it don’t have an incentive to push advertisers towards inventory that we own. We’re not a publisher. Google likes to say it’s a tech company, but it gets 99 percent of its revenues from ad sales, so it’s inherently conflicted when trying to sell other media owners’ inventory”

Aside from taking on Google, Spot Runner’s ambitions mainly rest on being a platform for major ad buyers and sellers. In addition to selling ads to national cable, Malibu will serve as space for online, radio, print, outdoor and mobile ad buys. At the start, though, the Malibu service will focus primarily on cable buys.

For the most part, Spot Runner’s big pitch rests on the promise that Malibu can help reduce—if not totally eliminate—the traditional methods of media buying, which still requires faxing orders back and forth. “I’ve heard agencies tell me that they literally send millions of faxes a year to transact their media buys,” Warren said. “They’ll now be able to complete a buy with just a few clicks online.”

Still, Malibu isn’t everything Spot Runner dreamed. During discussions with media companies as they tested Malibu, Warren realized that the company couldn’t “revolutionize” the buying process. “We had to keep it simple, and we were very wary of creating anything that would insert us into the buying process directly,” Warren said. In the meantime, Spot Runner is already working on “version 2” of Malibu, which it expects to release in late Q1.