The Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) is being proposed as the advertising industry’s newest open standard.
It’s an attempt to make every advertising system, from Meta to TikTok to Google Ads, speak the same language. It’s designed to let AI agents plan, negotiate, and execute media buys across channels without the endless friction of one-off integrations and siloed APIs.
For performance marketers, AdCP matters because it’s not another tool or platform. Instead, it’s open infrastructure that every tool or platform could build on, meaning it could help all the disparate systems in an adtech stack work together more seamlessly.
AdCP is actually built on Model Context Protocol - a more general-use protocol that was built to help LLMs interact with APIs.
Long term, AdCP could fundamentally change how campaigns are built, optimized, and measured, especially if it becomes widely adopted.
Short term, it’s actually not earth-shattering. At least not for Pixis customers. We already use a superior MCP framework to accomplish the same (and better) outcomes.
Still, there’s something to be said for standardization. The impact of AdCP will depend on how widely adopted it is.
Understanding AdCP
AdCP was created by a coalition of more than twenty adtech companies including Yahoo, PubMatic, Scope3, and Triton Digital. Their stated goal: to “make advertising technology work together, not against each other.”
In practice, AdCP defines standardized tasks and data models that AI systems can use to communicate about campaigns. This means everything from discovering audiences and creating media buys to tracking delivery and performance. It runs on JSON schemas that make these tasks interoperable.
For example, you could ask an AI agent, “What’s the best way to reach women in the UK interested in rock climbing?” and AdCP-enabled systems would translate that question into an API request (or multiple requests) that each connected platform could understand.
Then it would return comparable options from multiple platforms. That’s discovery, activation, and measurement handled in a consistent, auditable way.
Prism - our AI marketing OS - already does all of this.
See for yourself: start a free trial today.
How AdCP Differs from MCP
To understand AdCP, you need to know where it comes from. The protocol is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is an open standard designed to let AI systems exchange context safely and predictably. MCP defines how agents understand and use external data; AdCP applies that framework specifically to advertising.
In short: MCP is the foundation. AdCP is the advertising layer built on top of it.
MCP lets an AI agent understand what’s happening in your business systems. AdCP lets that agent take action inside the advertising ecosystem specifically.
Pixis built its products on MCP for this exact reason. It provides the structure needed to close the context gap that has limited marketers in their ability to turn data into insight, and insight to action.
What AdCP Means for Performance Marketers
In the near term, AdCP’s influence will start behind the scenes. Expect faster, more efficient campaign setups as tech vendors adopt the standard. Integrations that once took months could take days.
You’ll see the first tools like AI media-buyer assistants that can search and activate audiences across multiple platforms through a single interface.
The long-term shift could be bigger.
Depending on how widely adopted it becomes as a standard, AdCP could usher in an era of outcome-based media buying, where campaigns are negotiated across channels on the results marketers want (installs, purchases, subscriptions) rather than impressions or clicks. It could also chip away at the walls separating walled gardens and the open web, allowing more direct, transparent relationships between advertisers and publishers.
What AdCP Means for Pixis Customers
Whether AdCP becomes the industry standard or not, the age of context-aware advertising has begun.
Prism already treats every ad decision as a context decision: who, what, when, where and why synchronized across models and channels.
So our customers already enjoy:
- less operational drag
- better visibility into where spend goes
- the ability to orchestrate cross-channel performance in real time.
Prism is designed around the Model Context Protocol. In fact, this is the vision we’ve been building for years. Our internal framework standardizes how our AI agents interpret, reason and act across marketing systems.
If AdCP becomes the dominant open standard, we’d be excited to integrate it seamlessly as an external layer on top of MCP.
If not, Pixis’ MCP already provides a superior proprietary context layer that connects AI models, media platforms and creative intelligence in a closed-loop system.
The question for us isn’t whether to use AdCP, but how to make it interoperable. If AdCP matures, we’d use it as the handshake layer for advertisers, so we can always be compatible with any agentic ad network. If it doesn’t, Pixis’ MCP will continue to function as the de-facto contextual backbone for thousands of campaigns, proving that contextual intelligence doesn’t need to wait for standardization.
Industry Reaction So Far
The launch has drawn broad, if cautious, optimism.
Adtech veterans are calling it the “OpenRTB of the AI era.”
Publishers see a chance to present their data and audiences in a more transparent, direct way. Or at least, they’ll have less opportunity to avoid doing so.
Agencies see reduced integration costs and time-saved on campaign management tasks and workflows.
Marketers see a path toward less waste and more control.
The question now is adoption. The protocol’s success depends on how many platforms implement it. Early signals are encouraging—major players like Google and AppsFlyer have already adopted the underlying MCP framework that AdCP builds on.
But it will take time for the ecosystem to converge.
Don’t wait with everybody else. Start using Prism today.