Mountain, California-based advertising startup Vurve today announced that it has secured $4.5 million in Series A financing led by Spark Capital (who also recently invested in tablet advertising startup Onswipe), with participation from Dave McClure (more SG info on McClure here ) and True Ventures.

Vurve also announced that it has expanded its board of advisors to now include Matt Ackley, head of product, Search and Analytics, Google; Jan Pedersen, chief scientist, Microsoft Bing; and Umang Gupta, CEO, Keynote Systems.

“Without question, online advertising is the best and most targeted way to reach potential buyers. The problem is that effectively managing an online advertising campaign is complex, time consuming and often expensive — especially for small businesses that need to stay focused on the running their core business,” said Santo Politi, general partner at Spark Capital. “Setting up on an online storefront is one thing, but promoting that store to be successful is entirely different challenge that no vendor has been able to address — until now.

“Vurve has built a first-of-its-kind ‘marketing-as-a-service’ platform that is leveling the playing field for small businesses to advertise as broadly and effectively as the largest of businesses, but with affordability and simplicity that harkens back to the very early days of self-service AdWords. It is going to be huge.”

“With this new round of financing, we’re now focused on scaling our business to take advantage of the pent-up demand from small businesses to effectively leverage online advertising,” said Amit Kumar, founder and CEO of Vurve. “We’re looking to build out a team of talented professionals who are passionate about the online ad market and are ready to completely change the way the game is played for small businesses.”