sixteen:nine- SeeSaw Joins OVAB

This article originally was posted on November 8, 2007 at sixteen:nine.

By Dave Haynes

Interesting to get an e-mail yesterday from a publicist letting me know SeeSaw Networks has joined the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, aka OVAB.
With the exception of software vendor BroadSign, OVAB in its short history has only had members who are network operators, who do their own ad sales and compete with one another for ad spend. SeeSaw comes in as an affiliate member and, depending on how you look at it, either competes with all of them as an ad sales aggregator representing scores of networks, or potentially works with and for all of these guys.
I’ve not had any interaction with OVAB, but it strikes me that the point of view of SeeSaw and other sales aggregators is going to be pretty important. It should be, at least in theory, a relatively easy job to establish common ground and the beginnings of standards among the largest networks. Someone needs to get a word in for all the smaller ones popping up here there and everywhere, and it will be a long time before many of them have the dollars to formally join OVAB.