Is Your Media Company Building for One AI Protocol or What Comes Next?

Every quarter, a new AI standard makes headlines, promising to reshape media, advertising, or both. And every quarter, the same adoption conversation starts, stalls, and starts again whenever a new standard hits the front page. 

These conversations shouldn’t be unfamiliar. Remember the browser wars of the early aughts? Publishers had to build separate experiences for Netscape and Internet Explorer. Later, in mobile, the industry agonized over iOS versus Android. Each time, enormous energy was spent picking sides, hedging bets, and trying to predict a winner. And each time, the companies that came out ahead weren't the ones who chose the right horse, but the ones who built for the open field.

We’re at the familiar inflection point right now, except the standards are proliferating faster and the stakes are higher. 

What Today’s AI Standards Represent 

If you’ve read our previous thinking on Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), you know the story: AI agents are reshaping advertising infrastructure, and protocols like AdCP exist to give those agents a common language. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) is doing something similar on the AI tool and data side by creating a standardized way for AI models to connect with external systems, data sources, and services.

Both MCP and AdCP are real, both are important, and both signal a shift away from closed, platform-controlled systems toward something more open and interoperable. But while MCP and AdCP point in the right direction, they are by no means the final destination. 

The future these standards hint at is one where AI agents operate fluidly across systems, platforms, and protocols. In that world, it’s not about which protocol you’ve committed to, it’s whether your infrastructure can speak to all of them.

The Interoperability Imperative 

Media companies are uniquely exposed to the protocol proliferation problem. You sit at the intersection of content, advertising, audience data, and distribution, each developing its own agent-native standards, often independently.

Because of this complexity, the future will be a multi-protocol reality. AI agents will need to move fluidly across systems, and value will accrue to those who can operate across the entire surface area, not just one corner. To succeed, media companies must build data infrastructure that’s protocol-flexible from the ground up, so when a new standard emerges (and it will), integration is effortless.

Openness is the Opportunity 

Media companies that embrace an open architecture, designed to connect, adapt, and evolve, will be able to move with the market, no matter which standards gain traction. Those that bet too heavily on a single protocol, or worse, defer the infrastructure question entirely, will face costly catch-up work in a market that won’t wait.

The decentralized, agent-native future of media is already here, running alongside the old system and growing more capable every quarter. The question is whether your infrastructure is ready to meet it on its own terms — all of them.

Want to see how Akkio’s AI infrastructure enables openness today for tomorrow’s advancements? Check out our recent webinar with IPG, Digitas, and Mediaplus.