I’m as skeptical about the latest “shiny object” announcement as anyone else. And just coming back from Cannes Lions, companies both large and small had major news to share; the coming of agentic artificial intelligence was the talk of the town.
Right now, we’ve got marketing teams running 80 to 120 different tools and platforms. Half the time, they can’t even talk to each other easily—they are siloed. APIs come to the rescue and bring the necessary platform-to-platform connectivity needed to power today’s adtech ecosystem.
But APIs don’t solve for cross-platform orchestration. If you want to run a simple audience activation campaign across multiple channels, suddenly you need a team of engineers just to make it happen.
So, with everyone on the Croisette racing toward AI agents that promise to automate complex workflows, how can businesses actually start AI-enabling their tech stacks?
That hope is where the Model Context Protocol comes in. MCP isn’t going to inspire screaming headlines about epochal change for your career. There won’t be any conference sessions about MCPs replacing your job as an award-winning creative. But the potential is very real that MCP is emerging as the standard that will make our agentic marketing future a reality.
The foundation of connectivity
APIs are the OGs of connectivity. They’ve been around since the 1950s (really).
APIs are used to connect today’s tech stacks, but they clearly weren’t built with AI agents in mind. Consider a typical campaign workflow: You want to build an audience in your customer data platform, push it to The Trade Desk and Meta, get reporting back, optimize based on performance, track conversions, and send a summary to your client. Sounds simple enough. But in reality, you’re dealing with different rate limits, varying data structures, and about six different places where the whole thing can fall apart.
Now, imagine trying to get an AI agent to handle that workflow. With APIs, you’d need to teach the agent every platform’s specific requirements, every error condition, every little gotcha that comes with each integration. That doesn’t make business sense, especially when you are talking about 80-120 platforms in your tech stack.