You know when a layoff's really bad? When the CEO calls Valleywag to spin it. Spot Runner's Nick Grouf rang us up to let us know he was laying off 115 of the 385 or so employees at his online-advertising concern, which helps small businesses manage the complicated process of buying TV ads. The cuts follow a round of 50 layoffs in August. Grouf is also moving some key employees from an office in Fremont, Calif., which Spot Runner picked up when it acquired local-search startup Weblistic, to L.A. Grouf says Spot Runner is getting out of the search-ads market and "exploring strategic alternatives" for Weblistic, which is corporatespeak for trying to find a buyer. When he wasn't sounding like a get-out-the-vote robocall, Grouf did a decent job of feigning optimism."I feel really bullish about the business," Grouf tells us. But he was not bullish enough to reveal any numbers — like how much of the $51 million in venture capital Spot Runner raised earlier this year still remains in its bank account, and to what extent he reduced the company's monthly cash burn through these layoffs. He was more forthcoming about Joanne Bradford, the Microsoft executive he hired, briefly, as an executive vice president. She left Spot Runner after less than six months to join Yahoo, which had long been courting her. "Tell me about it," Grouf groused when we brought up Bradford's rapid departure. "After the Yahoo-Microsoft dance was over, they needed to move quickly on their ad sales group, and they made her an offer she couldn't refuse. The shame is we reorganized the business the way she wanted it to run, and she left midstream."