MCP Fundamentals

The choice sounds like an infrastructure preference. It is actually a constraint on where your team can work — a local server will not run in ChatGPT on the web, and no amount of configuration changes that.

Four ways to get software talking to your marketing data, and endless confusion about which to reach for. They are not competitors — each one answers a different question, and picking wrongly costs either an engineering quarter or a workflow that breaks silently.

An ads MCP is the connection that lets Claude or ChatGPT query your live campaign data instead of the screenshot you pasted. No code, no export, no dashboard. Here is what it is, what the tools actually look like, and what separates a useful one from a demo.