• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, September 13, 2010

TidalTV, which uses proprietary technology to insert targeted spots into online video, has opened a third sales office. Looking to attract more advertising clients in the entertainment space, the company has gone West, with a new Los Angeles base.

Datar Sahi, from Fox Digital, and Susan Jaget, from search engine/"how-to" site Mahalo.com, join as directors of West Coast sales. While based in Southern California, they will also cover territory that involves pitching tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Along with the executives sales offices in New York and Chicago, they will report to Brian Danzis, vice president of national advertising sales. The company has between 15 and 20 members of its sales staff.

Sahi was a territory manager at Fox Digital Media and formerly worked at MTV Networks and Yahoo Search Marketing. Previously, Jaget was director of social media solutions at Mahalo.com and worked in sales at MySpace.

While TidalTV has focused on optimization of addressable advertising in online video, it continues to search for opportunities in TV and mobile video. "An agnostic technology platform across all video platforms," is the aim, said TidalTV President Tom McMahon.

But for now, it is trying to ride the boom in online video, where the volume of in-stream spots is growing. "That's where the dollars are really flowing now," McMahon said.

Through a combination of audience data and mathematics, TidalTV bills itself as able to place the most germane spot before receptive audiences -- with targeting by age, ZIP codes, consumer behavior and other segmentation. Its ad-decisioning technology is being deployed as VivaKi spearheads a platform to take advantage of an "Ad Selector" format, in which a user can select the ad she prefers before an online video.

As for addressable TV, which holds considerable promise but has had a slower liftoff than Web video, McMahon said: "The technology hurdles to doing one-to-one targeting are high ... there's no question about the power though."