Signpost offers an advertising platform to small and medium businesses that resembles Google AdWords in a lot of areas, with the expectation of a fancier-looking dashboard that offers different functionality. That includes metrics with deeper location integration, or at least a bit more visualized than you would expect.  There’s also some built-in CMS features such as social page and newsletter management, and a ‘Merchant Center’ for coupons.

Signpost has a publisher network that covers 35 million users, and is looking to appeal to SMBs by offering the service for a fixed fee of $99/month rather than a revenue share. This idea is officially worth $3.75 million more as of today.

New investor Spark Capital jumped on board with a handsome Series A round of funding, and former AOL Patch sales head Chris DePatria is joining the company as well. He’ll be assuming the title vice president of revenue, and will be in charge of augmenting Singpost’s sales force and marketing.

“Signpost has big ambitions to become the go-to marketing platform for small businesses,” said Stuart Wall, CEO and founder of Signpost. “This round of funding, in conjunction with adding Chris as the leader of our sales team, will help us grow our company and continue expanding our reach into new markets.”

DePatria’s new company is addressing the things his former employer failed to – AOL didn’t adapt to the social/mobile phenomenon, and began to falter as new advertising platforms started to bite off chunks of its business. Last month it closed a $1 billion patent deal with Microsoft that shrunk the web portal’s patent portfolio by over 70 percent, a push that definitely bought the company more time but nothing else, and for a pretty great cost at that.