Who are the leading web advertising sales reps in the world? What kind of traffic do I need to have to get their attention?

I've tried feeding the question to Google, and various smaller alternatives of it too, but this seems to be the only page with even tangentially relevant info.

My ultimate goal is to sell advertising companies ad space on my network of websites. Though getting VC funding and entering the stock market is one of the more popular ways of generating big revenue, I would like that to be a consequence of my success in the ad industry. I have many sites in development that will form a network of disparate traffic generating sites.

Though I am an extremely long way away from approaching the top media buying entities, I ultimately aim to hire the top advertising sales representatives who have a large amount of contacts in the industry and help me sell ads to the 'big fish'.

What kind of traffic are such people looking for? In order to pique their interest, what parameters need to be met? Lots of media attention comes to mind, as well as grandiose figures like millions of page views per month. Can anyone please try and give a qualitative answer about this?

I'm trying to elicit responses that have goals - which I can print out in large fonts and stick to the wall behind my computer :)

This will not be a complete answer but as the first step you should either develop your own ad technology that will enable you to filter traffic or use a pre-developed one like OpenX etc.

I usually get a lot of traffic-requesting emails from local ad companies. For example an ad company in France requesting traffic from France only and paying a lot higher than regular ad providers. I turn them all down because I can't filter traffic in any way. Have too much apps to manually write ad-logic.

So If you are planning to sell ad space, just integrate or build a great technology that will ease your job to target your own traffic, then just put AdSense etc for now but include an advertiser contact info on your websites.

With this setup advertisers may find you or when you find them you may easily let them test your system.