The eternal question

NYTimes.com, CBS MarketWatch.com, Weather.com, USAToday.com, and CNET have launched something called the “At Work Brand Network,” to jointly sell advertising across their collective sites.
This sounds to me like a smaller, less useful competitor to DoubleClick. The rationale is to cut out the middleman and get more attention from the sales force. I can see why this would be attractive to the sites participating, but my question is:
Does this solve any problems for the advertiser?
If not, it’s futile