In this guest article, John Goulding, Global Chief Strategy Officer at MiQ, looks at why ad tech’s growing complexity demands a shared language – and how emerging standards like AdCP could help unify AI-driven media into a more connected, interoperable future.
If you’ve worked in ad tech for any length of time, you’ll know the feeling. Every few years, a new layer of innovation arrives, and with it, another layer of complexity. CTV, retail media, social commerce, clean rooms – each one expands what’s possible for marketers. But each also adds another translation layer, another set of rules, and another login screen to remember.
Today, that patchwork of DSPs, SSPs, data partners, and walled gardens makes up an ecosystem that’s never been more powerful, or more fragmented. The irony of progress is that as adtech has become smarter, connecting the dots has only become harder, and the arrival of AI is making that fragmentation impossible to ignore.
Why Adtech Has a Translation Problem
Automation has always promised to simplify marketing. But what we’re seeing with AI is something different. Rather than unifying the ecosystem, it’s exposing just how disconnected it really is.
Every AI system speaks its own dialect. Data fields, taxonomies, and APIs differ across platforms, creating a patchwork of intelligent tools that struggle to communicate. Without shared standards, agencies and advertisers spend more time connecting the dots than interpreting what they find. The challenge isn’t with the technology itself; it’s with the lack of a common language that lets systems understand one another.
Introducing AdCP: The Protocol for the AI Age
In 2010, Real-Time Bidding gave programmatic advertising a shared language. Fifteen years later, we need the same for AI.
Think about Spotify. Its recommendation engine pulls together billions of data points (what you’ve played, what others like you listen to, the time of day, etc) and turns all that chaos into something beautifully simple: a playlist that just works.
That’s what adtech should feel like. Instead, marketers today still face complexity at every turn. In a world trained on frictionless technology, simplicity isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the expectation.
That’s where the idea of an Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) comes in. It’s an emerging open standard that would allow AI-powered ad-buying agents to communicate seamlessly, exchanging campaign intent, audience signals, and performance data securely across platforms.
Rather than building yet another walled garden, AdCP is building the bridge between them, a kind of universal handshake for automated media. Think of it as creating a common language for the entire ecosystem. Today, the big tech players and their walled gardens each speak their own dialect – Mandarin, Hindi, English, Spanish, powerful but disconnected – AdCP is the translator that unites them all, the Esperanto of digital advertising, enabling true interoperability across platforms.
MiQ is a launch member of AdCP, working with others across the industry to test and inform how the new standard develops. Our Sigma Trading Agent already connects multiple DSPs through natural language prompts, an early example of how interoperable AI could make programmatic buying more efficient and connected. Drawing on our experience building technology that links different platforms, we’re contributing insights to help AdCP evolve into a shared framework for the wider ecosystem
What AdCP Could Mean for the Ecosystem
If successful, AdCP could do for the next decade of advertising what RTB did for the last, turning a collection of siloed technologies into a functioning marketplace of intelligence.
For agencies, AdCP would remove the need for bespoke integrations that eat into time and margin. It would make it possible for AI agents to activate, analyse, and optimise across multiple DSPs without manual intervention.
For advertisers, it could unlock transparency and efficiency, agentic systems that collaborate rather than compete, each optimising toward shared goals.
For regulators, AdCP could provide the beginnings of a more open, auditable framework, one where AI-driven decisions are traceable and explainable, building trust across the chain.
In essence, AdCP has the potential to become the connective tissue of the open web, translating signals between technologies that currently speak in silos.
The New Role of Strategy in the Age of Agents
AdCP isn’t a replacement for DSPs, clean rooms, or identity graphs. It’s a connective layer that helps them interoperate more effectively. Its role is harmonisation, translating campaign goals, audiences, and outcomes between different AI agents and buying environments.
As AI takes on more of the executional heavy lifting, the human role in advertising is shifting from “doing” to “directing.”
With shared standards like AdCP, strategists and planners can think across ecosystems rather than get stuck in the weeds. In the future, we may see the work becoming less about wiring systems together and more about orchestrating ideas, designing the objectives, constraints, and creative vision that intelligent systems then execute against.
The true power of AI will be unlocked by human intent. With a clear strategy, AI can deliver boundless performance; without it, it’s just busy work at scale. Ultimately, a connected ecosystem is only as strong as the people guiding its purpose.
Open Source Thinking for an Open Web
No single company can own the infrastructure of AI advertising. For AI to truly accelerate innovation, the industry must collaborate on open frameworks, built not for competition but for compatibility.
AdCP represents that kind of collective thinking. It could ensure that the next generation of adtech is interoperable by design, keeping the open web open for everyone.
As an industry, we’ve spent the past decade building smarter machines. The next decade is about teaching those machines to understand each other, and, ultimately, to understand us.
Just as RTB defined the first decade of programmatic, AdCP could define the next. The question isn’t just how we’ll build smarter agents, it’s how we’ll build a smarter, more connected ecosystem to gain the most benefit from them.
