No MCP, no deal

I used to think this was work.

Record the call. Open the recorder, copy the good bit, paste it in a doc. The quote arrives with a speaker label welded to the front, so retype it. New tab for the social post. New tab for the case study. New tab for the newsletter, where the formatting breaks, so fix it, then fix it again. Send.

Five tabs. By the second one the client's real words are gone and I'm writing from memory of a copy. I called this a workflow. I put it on a slide. People nodded.

The thing nobody prices

Ask a marketer why the marketing isn't landing and you'll hear about ideas. Not enough good ones. Wrong angle. Wrong hook.

It isn't that. We run this stuff across a lot of agencies and platforms at once, which is a decent seat. I can tell you what's already dead. I can tell you why the survey nobody answered had a hopeless first question. Show me five ideas and I'll bin three before you spend a penny, and I'll charge you for it, and you'll be better off.

What I can't do is tell you which of the last two lands. Nor can anyone. The one I'd have staked the retainer on goes nowhere and the throwaway runs for a year, and this keeps happening, to everyone, including the people who write threads explaining why it doesn't happen to them.

So what decides your marketing isn't how clever you are. It's what one attempt costs. At three hours of copying and pasting per launch you'll run four a quarter, and you'll love all four, because you carried them, and you'll defend the runt long past the point of dignity. At twenty minutes you'll run forty and kill most of them before lunch without feeling a thing.

Cut what it costs to be wrong. The rest sorts itself out.

So I ask one question

Does it have an MCP?

An MCP is the socket that lets a tool hand what it knows to an agent. Transcripts, drafts, posts, whatever it holds. No rep has ever opened a call with it. It doesn't demo. You can't screenshot it for the board. So it's cheap, which is usually the best reason to buy anything.

Our recorder has one, so the transcript turns up as words instead of a link to words. Beehiiv has one, which is how this reached you. Lovable has one, which is how we ship. A two hour roundtable becomes a case study, the posts under it and the ad copy under those, in one place, off the same source. Nothing gets retyped. Nothing gets softened by a middleman with a clipboard.

First party or it doesn't count

Substack hasn't got one. Framer hasn't got one. You'll find pages telling you otherwise, so let me save you the afternoon.

Search either and you get a dozen GitHub projects. Read the setup. Most want you to open devtools, filter the network tab, dig your session cookie out of the headers and paste it in a config file. That is not an integration. That is a man in a shed asking for your password.

Someone has to own the thing, version it, and answer the phone when it dies at 11pm before a launch.

Then there's LinkedIn

Nothing. LinkedIn ships no MCP, the real API is partner-gated and covers posting at best, and every LinkedIn MCP on GitHub drives your own logged-in session. Use one and you're betting the account.

So we type it in by hand, because that's where the buyers are. We are all slaves to the LI God, and the LI God takes no requests.

One exception is a rounding error. Twelve is a job.

Go and look

List every tool between the idea and the thing going live. Recorder, docs, CMS, ESP, ad platform, tracker.

Write yes or no next to each. First party MCP or not.

Every no is a tab, a paste, and a bit of the truth falling out on the way. Count them, then decide which one you'd miss.

Or don't. We do this for a living.

We audit the whole stack, not the marketing corner of it. Project tracker, messaging, docs, CRM, the analytics nobody opens, the thing one bloke still runs in a spreadsheet and gets defensive about.

Marketing tools last, and here's why. Nothing in your marketing stack is worth saying. The good line came off a sales call. The reason that customer left is in a support thread. The best explanation of what you do went to one colleague at 6pm in a DM. If your agent can't reach any of it, it writes about nothing, at length, in the voice of a press release. Most AI marketing is bad for this reason and not the one everyone gives.

So we map what you've got, mark each tool yes or no, and tell you what to wire together, what to swap, and what to leave alone because the switching cost isn't worth it.

Send me a message asking about “stacks” and I’ll send you what’s involved.