“Standing in the way of control / You live your life / Survive the only way that you know.” — Gossip, “Standing in the Way of Control”
For years, publishers have done what they had to do to survive — navigating opaque supply chains, blunt safety tools, and automation that trades transparency for control. Now, emerging standards like AdCP aim to turn that endurance into empowerment. But survival instincts die hard — can the industry learn to thrive?
“We’ve commoditized the very thing we need to monetize.”
That was a bar Jana Meron of Lionness Strategies dropped during a recent LinkedIn Live called “Driving Performance and Suitability in Programmatic,” which I recently hosted for AdExchanger.
When you think about where this sentiment comes from, it makes so much sense. Publishers have spent years fighting for agency in a programmatic world built around someone else’s rules. That’s the tension running across the industry right now.
We’re constantly optimizing for cleaner supply paths, sharper targeting, and better measurement. Yet, the systems we’re optimizing on were never built for connection.
They were built to control access to data, to demand, to transparency — keeping publishers dependent on intermediaries instead of empowered by interoperability.
As Alexis Hochleutner of ARC Dig IO added on that same LinkedIn Live, “Transparency shouldn’t stop at the invoice; it should start with context.”
And that’s where the disconnect lives. Context is what gives inventory meaning, but it’s also where control hides.
We’ve built workflows focused on compliance and brand safety, rather than innovation and collaboration — the kind of creative problem-solving that actually connects buyers, sellers, and audiences.
The Illusion of Control
I once believed that SPO 2.0 would fix all of this. It did some of the plumbing work. There were fewer hops, more transparent fees, but the trust gap remains.
The transparency the system needs ends where the APIs do. Suitability filters still block the journalism that drives brand equity. And contextual targeting, hailed as the ultimate privacy-safe solution, is still treated like an accessory rather than the operating system.
We’ve cleaned the pipes, but the flow still isn’t free. Static systems can’t keep up with dynamic realities.
That’s why contextual needs the same kind of standardization that SPO brought to supply. Could the new Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) — a shared framework for context and quality — be the answer?
The New Architecture of Connection
AdCP and Model Context Protocol (MCP) are being built as the connective rails of an agentic advertising ecosystem — where AI systems plan, negotiate, and optimize with transparency baked in.
They weren’t developed to replace OpenRTB or Prebid. They will sit above them, creating a common automation layer so buying and selling systems can understand the same signals and execute the same instructions.
AdCP standardizes how contextual, suitability, and sustainability data move between buyers, sellers, and agents. While MCP orchestrates the reasoning layer — how models talk, verify, and adapt in real-time.
Imagine publishers negotiating deals, activating campaigns, and verifying supply-path trust — all through AI agents that speak a common language. Ultimately, freeing ops teams to focus on strategy and creativity rather than troubleshooting.
Together, AdCP and MCP offer an opportunity to transform transparency into interoperability — and control into collaboration.
Is Attention the New Signal of Connection?
One thing that stood out on that LinkedIn Live with Meron and Hochleutner was this blind spot they both discussed. It was that performance without verified media quality is just more noise dressed up as efficiency.
Let’s say AdCP and MCP help address the technical side of that blind spot, providing access to data and enabling interoperability between systems. We’ll still need a solid measurement that proves audience value. And that can’t be CTR, can it?
If connection depends on trust, then could attention be the new currency?
While attention shows promise, it has been in an experimental phase for years. That’s why I’m really intrigued by Adelaide’s recently launched AU Ecosystem.
It’s a dedicated marketplace for attention-based media quality built around the AU (Attention Unit) metric, which predicts how likely an ad placement is to capture audience attention and drive outcomes.
The platform aims to connect buyers and sellers around shared standards for media quality. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Spotify, and Condé Nast have already joined, offering high-AU packages and sponsorships that make third-party attention measurement frictionless for advertisers.
If you attended AdMonters Sell Side Summit in Nashville a couple of months ago, you heard Jennifer Castillo, Executive Director of Ad Operations at Dow Jones, talk about The Wall Street Journal’s attention guarantees, with a flight of 6 successful tests during the 2024 presidential campaign.
But even with this move, questions about control remain. Does creating a curated attention marketplace concentrate power among a few major players, or does it open the way to fairer trade in quality?
As attention becomes the new signal of value, do we risk replicating programmatic’s old hierarchy under a shinier name — standards that centralize power even as they promise freedom?
From Protocols to Practice
If AdCP and MCP can provide the blueprint for interoperability, and initiatives like Adelaide’s AU prove there’s real demand for shared definitions of quality, then Permutive’s recently launched Halo Suite is how publishers can start putting those ideas into action.
As Joe Root, CEO and co-founder of Permutive, explained at last week’s Permutive Data Collaboration Summit, the push for Halo came directly from publishers themselves.
“Publishers are under more pressure than ever. Audience and ops teams are stretched thin, responding to more RFPs, chasing higher win rates, and delivering on outcomes — all while doing it with fewer resources. Two years ago, our customers asked us to help solve that problem,” he said.
Built within Permutive’s privacy-first infrastructure, Halo was designed to minimize operational overhead, allowing publishers to focus on strategy and results. The intelligent system can predict, automate, and act across campaigns without sacrificing control.
Halo’s sell-side agents are reportedly already running hundreds of millions in campaign spend, optimizing everything from audience management to creative delivery in real-time.
Halo is what happens when the promise of AdCP meets the reality of ad ops — agents that put interoperability to work. They automate planning, optimization, and reporting across systems while keeping publishers’ first-party data protected and under their control.
The question now isn’t whether agentic systems will change how buying and selling happens — they already are. The challenge is whether these new platforms, protocols, and quality marketplaces will finally build equity across the ecosystem — or shift control from one set of gatekeepers to another.
The Connected Future
Protocols alone won’t save us. Industry standards always take time. For now, AdCP and MCP remain blueprints more than finished bridges. Open can still mean centralized.
Meanwhile, automation, if left unchecked, can recreate the very opacity it’s meant to replace — a faster black box with fewer humans in the loop. And adoption? Early, slow, and uneven.
That’s why this conversation continues to build toward AdMonsters Sell Side Summit Austin, where The Connected Future will take center stage.
I recently had a prep call with one of our keynotes, Amanda Martin, CRO of Mediavine, where we discussed how every layer of ad tech has its own version of control. And, how real collaboration means being willing to give some of it up.
Programmatic doesn’t need more control. It needs stronger connections. Connected systems. And, open communication. That brings me full circle to my LinkedIn conversation with Meron and Hochleutner.
Publishers are fighting to build sustainable revenue models. At the same time, advertisers are pushing for more control — tighter brand safety, complete visibility into spend, and performance guarantees that often involve greater risk and move more margin onto the publisher.
Both sides are struggling to view the other’s transparency demands as a mutual opportunity rather than a threat.
While AdCP, MCP, Adelaide’s AU Ecosystem, and Permutive’s Halo all promise to bring connection and transparency to life, Martin reminded me of one vital thing. It’s that progress won’t come from automation alone. It will come from rebuilding trust between buyers and sellers.