In August, MDC Partners announced the formation of Varick Media Management, which is the first company that allows media trading in real time across all online exchanges, ad networks and websites. This is part of kirshenbaum bond + partners, by the way. From the website:

"Similar to the way that hedge funds pool investment and algorithmically trade, we'd like to think we are extremely similar. Instead of investing in the financial markets, we're investing our clients money within the media markets aiming to return a very solid ROI for each individual client. Think of us as the first advertising hedge fund."

They've even coined a new term - Mediatrage, which describes the algorithmics and stats they use to trade media. Using some fancy math and partnerships with Google / DoubleClick AdX, Yahoo! RightMedia, Microsoft AdECN, AOL Spot Market, et al., Varick is looking to be a real player. Whether it will work? Remains to be seen, but isn't it nice how they're messing with the status quo.

Somewhere GroupM's Meyer Lansky aka Irwin Gottlieb is mulling this over and is like, "why didn't I think of that?"

More: Irwin Gottlieb Does Not Give A Fuck