With about 100 days until the World Cup, Telemundo is making its pitch to viewers.

Today, Telemundo, the exclusive Spanish-language home of the tournament in the U.S., revealed details of its extensive coverage plans for the upcoming World Cup taking place in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, including the launch of a new marketing campaign aimed at bringing fans together.

Speaking with ADWEEK, Joaquin Duro, evp of sports and head of streaming, Telemundo, said there would be more than 700 hours of programming, including a live presence at all 104 matches, dedicated daily shows, and an extensive digital footprint. In addition, every match will stream live on Peacock and the Telemundo app.

Duro noted that Telemundo was aiming to be ambitious with its coverage plans, which had been more than two years in the making, with the network bringing live programming from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily to show matches and provide additional shoulder programming.

“Every single product or every single type of content, from podcasts to free channels to DTC to shows to documentaries to news, entertainment, sports,” Duro said. “We’re covering everything from a multi-platform and multi-format approach.”

Kicking off a new campaign

To further reach fans, Telemundo is celebrating the release of its official World Cup song, “Somos Más,” and a new phase of its marketing campaign, “Y Tú, ¿Con Quién Lo Vas a Ver?” (“Who Will You Watch It With?”).

ADWEEK has the exclusive first look at the campaign’s 60-second ad here:

Unlike Telemundo’s recent Super Bowl spot, which focused on reaching general audiences with the help of Sofia Vergara and Owen Wilson, Duro said the latest campaign focuses more on Telemundo’s core Spanish-speaking audience.

The new campaign, which showcases a man going to great lengths to track down his friend, is Telemundo’s way of inviting viewers to watch the World Cup together.

“Hopefully, we can unite all of us,” Duro said. “Regardless of nationality or the color of your skin, we can think of, who are you going to watch it with? Who are you going to enjoy this with? Because nobody enjoys the World Cup alone.”

And Telemundo is bringing plenty of programming to keep viewers occupied.

The programming game plan

Among Telemundo’s broadcasts, the company will showcase a daily kickoff show, Hoy en el Mundial, which will preview the action. Other shows include Vive el Mundial, which will connect viewers with on-site talent, and Pasión Mundial, which serves as a bridge across the day’s schedule.

In addition, the Telemundo Deportes Ahora FAST channel will provide programming across platforms such as Peacock, Xumo, Roku, Prime Video, TCL, Google TV, and Comcast, casting a wide net and bringing more viewers into the Telemundo ecosystem, according to Duro.

Further enhancing its digital reach, Telemundo is also rolling out an ambitious social strategy across platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and X. Among the social programming, El Mundial After Dark will be a nightly social-first recap across all Telemundo Deportes platforms, and The World Cup Match Watch Party will offer daily live match companion streams with influencers and guests in real-time.

Duro said the strategy was to reach as many people as possible, with programming starting out broader and becoming more soccer-specific and detailed closer to the matches.

“We talk to everyone. This is co-viewing for family,” Duro said. “I’m a soccer fan, but I also have many other interests. Many people are casual fans, so we need to cover everybody.”

That’s something advertisers will be counting on as the World Cup, which kicks off in June across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, is drawing fervent interest from brands.

Ads that are additive to the sport

Telemundo announced in December that its World Cup ad inventory was nearly sold out, with representation from nearly 60 brand partners across industries such as alcohol, auto, finance, QSR, retail, and telecom.

Duro noted that there were numerous ways Telemundo would incorporate sponsors for the upcoming matches, including things like banners on the screen, squeezeback ads, and hydration breaks, which allow the programming to cut to commercials.

“All of our clients have asked for it, our FIFA clients and FIFA sponsors, and we are very creative, and we’ve used it in the past,” Duro said of the hydration breaks.

However, Duro emphasized that he’s a fan himself and, above all, the programming will prioritize the viewer experience, with the broadcast staying on the action for critical moments.

“[We’re] always thinking about the fan and always thinking about that moment where they put a mic on top of the coach talking to somebody in a semifinal,” Duro said. “That content is very valuable, so we don’t want to miss it.”

In a new 44-slide pitch deck, obtained exclusively by ADWEEK, X is once again pitching itself as a highly safe environment for advertisers. The slides promote various tools for transparency, campaign measurement, and brand safety that debuted between 2022 and 2025. X presented the deck to brand- and agency-side advertisers last week, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

These include keyword controls, blocklists, as well as partnerships with leading media quality firms DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science (IAS), and Trustworthy Accountability Group. 

Notably, the deck positions Grok—the AI chatbot operated by X’s parent company xAI and integrated natively into X—as a cornerstone of the app’s brand safety and suitability mission. One slide claims Grok provides “enhanced contextual understanding of posts”; the ability to “identify sensitive topics based off of cultural trends on X”; and “superior text recognition across content formats including images with oddly-sized or distorted text.” 

But throughout the past year, Grok has not only failed to ensure brand safety but in some instances disseminated the very content that brands deem most unsafe. In January, users prompted Grok en masse to flood X with sexually explicit nonconsensual deepfake images of real users. Around 6,700 such images appeared hourly during one 24-hour observational period, tallied by deepfake researcher Genevieve Oh. Now, that incident is the subject of various regulatory investigations across the globe. Six months earlier, Grok had spewed violent and antisemitic content on the social platform, producing rape fantasies and calling itself ‘MechaHitler.’ 

The company says in the document that it is “deeply committed to safety for all.” 

In the new pitch deck, X claims Grok “exceeds industry benchmarks” for brand safety, with an “average brand safety score” above 99.99% according to IAS and DoubleVerify, though details about these methodologies were not shared. In 2024, DoubleVerify publicly said that X’s brand safety rate is 99.99%—a figure that referred not to the share of content that is brand-safe on X, but to the rate of effectiveness of X’s proprietary brand safety systems at the time. However, the rate was never presented as a representation of Grok’s capabilities.

“This webinar session and deck were part of our ongoing proactive communication with clients. Transparency and control are the core tenants,” said a spokesperson for X.

DoubleVerify declined to comment. IAS declined to share specifics about its methodology but directed readers to learn more about its work with X in a blog post on its website. That post includes no mention of Grok.

The deck spotlights various other products and tools designed to give advertisers greater control over their placements and to assure them that content on X is being effectively moderated.

A significant portion is dedicated to highlighting Community Notes, X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking feature, which allows users to add relevant context to posts that may include misinformation. Users are 80% more likely to delete a post if it receives a Community Note, according to research from Sorbonne Université Paris, Cornell University, and University of Washington. Now, X says it is piloting a new program that allows AI tools to propose Community Notes called the AI Note Writers API.

An appendix to the document also makes specific recommendations for the controls that advertisers should consider applying to different kinds of ad buys on X. For example, the company suggests applying pre-bid adjacency controls and “limited” sensitivity settings for timeline, profile, reply, search, and vertical video ads.

X’s advertising business has suffered substantive losses since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the platform in late 2022, in large part due to brand safety concerns. Upon his takeover, Musk aggressively cut headcount, flipped the blue check-based identity verification system on its head, and loosened the app’s content moderation policies. The upheaval spurred a mass exodus of advertisers, many of whom did not want to risk their messages appearing next to controversial content. 

Though many major advertisers, including IBM, Disney, and Apple, have since returned to the platform, X’s total 2025 ad revenues, according to estimates from Emarketer, reached just $1.25 billion—roughly half the $2.43 billion it tallied in 2021 before Musk’s takeover.

In January, X elevated Monique Pintarelli to global head of advertising at xAI, part of its push to recover these lost revenues. In conversation with ADWEEK earlier this year, Pintarelli said X is focused on “how we can create user experiences on the platform that can also be beneficial for the advertising community.”

See the full pitch deck below. 

Anthropic is making the most of its fallout with the U.S. Department of Defense—and the subsequent influx of interest in its answer engine Claude, promoting its memory import feature, which lets users port over their chat history from other AI chatbots.

The memory tool was originally debuted in October of last year, but the company is promoting it anew after integrating memory import interface tools directly into Claude’s settings and publishing a dedicated landing page over the weekend. The dedicated landing page includes demo videos and clear instructions for how users can “switch to Claude without starting over.”

The memory import feature was previously accessible to paid subscribers only, but starting today is available to all users for free.

The timing of the promotion is opportunistic. Last week, Claude shot to the top of app store ratings, hitting #1 in the free app category in the U.S. on iOS after Anthropic refused to budge in the Pentagon’s pressure campaign against the company. The company’s CEO Dario Amodei said Anthropic would not allow its tech to be used for mass surveillance of American citizens or to develop autonomous weaponry, rejecting an ultimatum levied against the lab by DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth. In response, President Trump barred the use of Anthropic products by the U.S. government. On the same day, rival OpenAI swooped in and secured a contract with the DoD. 

Though OpenAI claimed in a statement that its deal terms include “more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s,” the decision led to immediate and widespread backlash. Consumers took to social media to bash the company, suggesting it had folded to the Trump administration’s aggressive demands. Now, a ‘Cancel ChatGPT’ trend has spurred some 1.5 million users to sign a boycott pledge on one activist site.

The outrage directed toward OpenAI has seemingly led to a spike in Claude usage. Anthropic has seen free active users surge 60% and daily signups quadruple since the start of the year. Paid subscribers have also more than doubled this year, according to the company. 

Social engagements are only fanning the flames. A post on X from pop star Katy Perry last week that included a screenshot of Claude’s subscription signup page with a superimposed heart shape attracted 51,000 likes and over 5,500 reposts. 

done pic.twitter.com/DkS9DmlUAR

— KATY PERRY (@katyperry) February 28, 2026

Of course Anthropic hasn’t fully escaped scrutiny. X creator Jules Zucker, for example, who has 159,000 followers, called out Anthropic’s work with defense tech company Palantir, suggesting that both it and OpenAI are potentially complicit in acts of war. 

In any case, Anthropic is taking advantage of the buzz. Its fresh promo for Claude’s memory import feature signals to consumers that the platform is friendly to ChatGPT émigrés. 

The push arrives as competition between the two labs intensifies. Last month, the Anthropic aired a
Super Bowl campaign that promised an ad-free experiences, a subtle dig at OpenAI’s plans to integrate advertising into its chatbot.

It started so well. Last month, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of his first chance to try the company’s new flagship burger, the Big Arch, which debuts across the U.S. on March 3.

It lined up as the perfect marketing moment. The boss, front and center, celebrating his new creation. And he was effusive as he opened the box. It was “so good.” It was “unique.” “So much going on”. 

Kempczinski is a P&G grad. This was the textbook windup from the Big Boss.

Then he took the bite.

The bite itself—like a man defusing something—was not a bite at all. It was a clip of the outer edge, while he disconcertingly talked about it as the “product.” Then “this thing.” 

What happened next, or rather what didn’t, sealed the video’s fate. It ends with 2.3% of the burger consumed and Kempczinski wafting the rest of his Big Arch around like a flag of surrender. He promises to enjoy it off-camera.

The video has been picked apart across social, and musician Garron Noone delivered the line that will follow Kempczinski to his grave: “This man does not eat McDonald’s.”

Kempczinski is, by all accounts, an excellent CEO. 

Harvard MBA, Duke undergrad, 25 years in blue-chip consumer companies. He claims to eat at McDonald’s several times a week. 

McDonald’s has performed strongly on his watch. He knows the P&L, the franchisee economics, the supply chain, the digital strategy. 

What he also knows, and what the video made obvious to several million people simultaneously, is that the Big Arch contains enough calories to power a small Zamboni.

This is the central tension of the modern CEO. The higher you rise, the further you get from the thing you sell. You earn $20 million a year, for selling a combo meal that costs nine bucks.  

The contradiction is as gigantic as it is intractable. You become a manager of managers, a master of the universe, a special visitor to conquered foreign lands. You know your product intimately as a concept—its market share, brand equity, net promoter score—but you stop knowing it as a thing you shove in your mouth on Tuesday when you’re shitfaced. 

Warren Buffett drinks five cans of Coke a day, not as a brand exercise, but because at the age of eight, he tried his first Coke and never really stopped thinking about it. He declared Cherry Coke the official drink of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Berkshire owns 400 million Coca-Cola shares worth north of $20 billion. None of it feels like strategy. It feels like a man who loves his product and has never once had to pretend.

Buffett works as a brand ambassador for the same reason Kempczinski does not: his consumption is entirely unconditional. 

He doesn’t drink Coke because he owns shares. He owns shares because he drinks Coke.

Akio Toyoda didn’t just drive his own product—he raced it. Every summer, he would disappear to the Nürburgring and compete in the 24-hour endurance race as “Morizo,” because Toyota’s leadership considered the whole enterprise an embarrassing distraction. 

There was no factory support, and no official entry. He sourced a second-hand Toyota Altezza, modified it himself, and lined up against development cars from Porsche and BMW. He was overtaken by all of them, repeatedly. Later, he described the humiliation of competitors screaming past him as a defining experience in his leadership journey, and the start of the re-invention of Toyota’s performance division.

Contrast that with Mark Zuckerberg. In 2016, a photo of his MacBook emerged showing his laptop camera and microphone jack sealed with masking tape. This is the CEO of a company that built its entire business model on the premise that sharing your life with the world is natural—a company that faced congressional hearings over surveillance concerns. 

Those little slices of black tape said everything that Zuck’s testimony didn’t. What Zuckerberg the CEO does at work differs from what Mark gets up to when he heads home. 

There’s a simple brief to any CEO suddenly confronted with that most dangerous of things: their own product. Consume it. 

Not once a quarter for a comms team. Regularly, privately, like a normal human being. Eat the burger. Drink that soda. Drive the car. Because in that moment, your product isn’t telling you something about your company. It’s saying something about you. 

Buffett and Toyoda built great companies partly because they closed the distance between their lives and their products. It made them better leaders. 

Let’s rewind the tape. Same burger. Same CEO. Different version. 

Kempczinski opens the box. He doesn’t describe it. He doesn’t call it a product. He says three or four lines. Then he picks it up with both hands—because that’s what you do with a Big Arch—leans forward slightly so the sauce doesn’t hit his shirt, and takes a proper, committed, three-inch bite. He chews. He doesn’t perform the chewing. He just chews.

Maybe he says something, maybe he doesn’t. He doesn’t wave it around. He doesn’t talk about “this thing” like he’s handling evidence. The video ends with him nodding, half the burger still in his hand. It’s the kind of nod that says this is good. That this is all getting eaten. That he wants to be nowhere else than right here, right now. Running McDonald’s, eating McDonald’s. CEO and product in perfect harmony all from one single bite.

Maybelline New York and Essie, both owned by L’Oréal, are bringing in one agency to run social for the first time.

VML has been named lead U.S. social agency for the brands following a competitive review, the agency told ADWEEK, with a remit spanning social strategy, content production, and community management. The scope does not include influencer marketing.

The pitch began in November 2025, consolidating what had been a patchwork of internal teams, according to VML.

The move reflects a broader reckoning in beauty, where discovery and purchase are increasingly happening on TikTok and Instagram, making social a key commerce channel. For brands like Maybelline and Essie, in the makeup and nail polish sectors, respectively, that shift demands a more integrated approach to content.

“It wasn’t just content creation,” Leo Madden, global client partner at VML, told ADWEEK. “It was strategy, production, real-time community management, listening, performance measurement—all working together as an engine.”

The review, which ran through early 2026, was managed internally by the brand rather than through a search consultancy. Madden said he didn’t have visibility into how many agencies competed.

Maybelline spent approximately $60 million on media in 2025 and Essie spent around $10 million, according to COMvergence estimates.

While the two brands will share a social team, their voices will stay distinct, Madden said. Work is already underway, with content live since January and VML teams actively providing community management, though the agency declined to share specific examples.

The win comes as VML is pulled into a new group called WPP Creative as part of CEO Cindy Rose’s $676 million cost cutting plan. Longtime VML global CEO Jon Cook was promoted to lead the division as CEO.

ADWEEK has launched a new award to celebrate exceptional talent in the growing commerce space.  

ADWEEK’s inaugural Commerce All-Stars recognizes the most innovative and successful executives shaping the future of the commerce and retail media ecosystem. The list will honor executives (EVP and above) who redefine how brands, retailers, and technology partners collaborate to deliver measurable impact, customer value, and scalable growth across the shopper journey.

From leveraging first-party data and innovative measurement solutions to delivering modern commerce experiences that drive performance, the ADWEEK Commerce All-Stars are reshaping the retail landscape.

To submit a nominee, use the entry form below. The final deadline to submit is Friday, April 3, 2026 at 11:59pm PST.

For any questions, please contact awards@adweek.com. 

The numbers

$9.5 billion—Warner Bros. Discovery’s total revenues in Q4. Total revenue for fiscal 2025 was $37.3 billion, a 5% decrese.

-9%—Ad revenues decline, as ad-lite streaming subscriber growth was more than offset by domestic linear audience declines. The loss of the NBA negatively impacted the growth rate by 4%.

-10%—Content revenues decrease, driven by lower content sales due to the timing of renewals at the studios and global linear networks segments.

131.6 million—WBD’s total streaming subscribers across HBO Max and Discovery+, an increase of 3.5 million from Q3. However, WBD said Q4 2025 was also the final quarter it would consistently report subs.

The watercooler talk

WBD gave a little insight into the company’s upcoming sale during a Q4 earnings call on Thursday. In a letter to shareholders, WBD noted that, while its merger with Netflix “remains in effect” and the company’s board “continues to recommend the Netflix transaction,” a recent updated proposal from Paramount Skydance could lead to a “Company Superior Proposal” as defined in the Netflix Merger Agreement.

During the call, WBD CEO David Zaslav also said that, due to a competitive merger process, the company has continually raised its value. WBD’s stock was around $12 in Sept. 2025 and is now sitting at around $29. Zaslav said there’s been a more than 60% increase in value since the first offer was received. The CEO added that any deal would focus on maximizing value and minimizing downside risk. In addition, the company’s board is continuing to lead a “rigorously highly competitive” sales process.

Though Paramount recently raised its proposal from an all-cash offer of $30 per share to $31 per share, WBD is still recommending Netflix’s bid for now. Netflix’s bid was revised in January to an all-cash offer of $72 billion, or $27.75 per WBD share.

The key quote

“There can be no assurance that the board will conclude that the transaction proposed by [Paramount Skydance] is superior to the merger with Netflix or that any definitive agreement or transaction will result from Warner Bros. Discovery’s discussions with [Paramount Skydance]. The board remains committed to maximizing shareholder value and certainty while mitigating downside risks, and the board will evaluate any proposal against that standard with the objective of delivering the best deal for our shareholders.” — WBD letter to shareholders

An Android-based mobile fraud operation designed to milk ad revenues from AI-generated shell websites has been shut down by Google and ad verification firm Integral Ad Science (IAS). The scheme was executed through more than 25 million consumer devices.

Throughout late 2025, the scheme, dubbed Genisys, used over 115 distinct mobile apps to propagate fraudulent ad activity. When users downloaded an affected app—most of which were basic utility apps like QR code scanners, PDF readers, or WiFi detectors—secret in-app browsers covertly pushed traffic to nearly 500 AI-generated domains in order to monetize ad engagement.

Affected apps were generally basic single-function tools like flashlights, PDF converters, or wallpaper providers. The websites generally looked like blogs, news publishers, or informational sites. 

Many of the AI-generated domains were designed to look like generic, informative sites.

Not only did the operation hijack users’ devices without their knowledge it also led to wasted investment for many advertisers whose messages were not shown to real people. IAS Threat Lab was unable to quantify the total ad spend wasted by the scheme, but determined that its traffic generated millions of bid requests, leading advertisers to serve ads against bot traffic.  

Hadi Shiravi, a senior engineering manager at IAS Threat Lab, warned that AI is being used to quickly set up and aggressively expand these fraud schemes. “These are scales we haven’t seen before,” Shiravi said. “It’s very easy for them to spin up these domains, scale them and at a very low cost,” Shiravi added.

Plus, technical advancements are making it easier for AI-generated content to bypass standard monitoring techniques employed by ad exchanges and supply-side platforms.

To further obscure the activity and avoid detection, fraudsters misrepresented bundle IDs, unique codes used to identify specific apps. Instead of displaying their real bundle IDs, the fraudulent apps showed the IDs of a wide range of real, popular apps—like Netflix and Instagram—to suggest that the traffic going to the shell websites was legitimate. Some of the domains showed upwards of 300 app bundle IDs generating traffic. 

After detecting the fraud operation in September of last year during a regular monitoring process, IAS Threat Lab followed its proliferation before it reached its peak in December. Google instigated its own investigation into the apps, and eventually, it pulled the fraudulent apps from the Play Store. Plus, a security tool called Google Play Protect will automatically disable Genisys-affiliated apps—even if they come from outside the Play Store—and alert users in the future if they interact with such an app. The organizations claim they’ve reduced Genisys-related bid requests by over 95%.

“Bad actors are constantly changing tactics, which is why we collaborate with IAS and others across the industry to disrupt fraud networks,” a Google spokesperson told ADWEEK. The spokesperson added that the removal of the affected apps is intended to help “protect people and businesses from abuse,” but declined to comment further on the record.

Including Genisys, Google pulled over 870 Android apps associated with at least three large-scale ad fraud schemes within the last year.

The AI-generated domains at the heart of the Genisys operation signal a sea change; next-generation ad fraud schemes will “absolutely” be enabled by AI, Shiravi said. It’s a summons the media industry will have to answer. 

The IAS Threat Lab, for its part, claims to be actively preparing, according to Vidhya Rohini Raman, the division’s senior director of data science and engineering. “We are simultaneously developing product to detect low-quality generative AI content and integrating it into our core product ecosystem,” she said, “so our advertisers will be able to benefit from improved detection and avoidance capabilities, and that, in turn, will help them focus on high-performing media.”