Good morning. It’s Day 2 of a hot and humid Cannes Lions ad festival. If you’re on the ground, please say hi to CMO Today’s Katie Deighton and the rest of the Wall Street Journal team, whether out and about or at our Journal House.

We start today with Katie’s report, then examine the Trump Organization’s promises for a new smartphone and get into the weed(s) of the relaunch plan for High Times.

Katie Deighton writes from Cannes:

Hello from day two of Cannes Lions. Yesterday I moderated a panel about the cost of AI on agencies with the 4As and Forrester. It was a candid, in-the-weeds discussion spanning monetization, remuneration and threat of mass layoffs—research author Jay Pattisall poo-pooed a forecast that the technology would only reduce headcount by 10%, predicting “significantly more” cuts—but one that also unearthed solutions, like the complete overhaul of agency business models. So, no biggie.

Meta later in the day held a press conference to walk through no less than nine new ad-adjacent product announcements, the majority of which involved some kind of AI component. Executives throughout the presentation made a point of conveying how much the company respects and wants to continue working with agencies.

“We believe these tools will make things easier for marketers and agencies to produce diverse content at scale,” said Helen Ma, vice president of product management for Facebook and Messenger monetization. “We still very much believe that humans are the most important and essential part of a campaign's success.”

Elsewhere: My lunch with a bunch of miscellaneous British ad execs descended into rampant speculation over Mark Read’s successor at WPP—a conversation that I’m sure was happening across tables at multiple other restaurants throughout the town. Names were thrown around (off the record, I’m sorry to say), but everybody agreed the new CEO would likely come from outside the company.

And no matter what attendees’ thoughts were on the future of the holding company, the line for its agency VML’s beach party was one of the longest on the Croisette last night.

Meanwhile: Cannes Lions began handing out its awards on Monday night, including Grand Prix honors for Budweiser’s one-second TikTok ads, a Viagra campaign in a country where DTC drug marketing is banned, and a destigmatization campaign called “The Best Place in the World to Have Herpes.” [The Drum] 

The Future Lions category for young talent honored concepts including a paddle that changes color in contaminated water. [Ad Age]  

Katie Deighton caught up with actor and agency owner Ryan Reynolds, who last month was named chief creative officer of connected TV ad company MNTN and this week is on the ground in Cannes. His answers have been edited and condensed.

It's been seven years since Maximum Effort, your creative agency, hit the scene. Do you consider yourself firmly ensconced in the advertising community now?

The wonderful part of our jobs at Maximum Effort is we get to dabble in a lot of communities—advertising, films, TV sports, spirits and a lot of others—so I always think of myself as a dabble type more than an ensconce type. But ensconced does sound more French. Either way, the ad world has been wonderful and welcoming to me so I definitely consider myself a part of it.

MNTN went public in May. How have you found the experience of riding the stock market since then?

Honestly, I don’t even have the stock price pinned anywhere on my phone. We just stay focused on executing MNTN’s mission: to democratize television advertising through technology.

What's your pitch for MNTN at this year's festival? Who are you here to take meetings with?

The pitch is the same as it’s always been: MNTN is expanding the TV market by turning it into the next great performance channel and, as a result, bringing thousands of new advertisers to TV. At these events, I really just try to meet new people, listen and search for kindred spirits so that’s what I’ll do. Advertising is supposed to be fun!

Which is more fun: Cannes Lions, or the film festival?

They’re both fun for different reasons because I’m wearing different hats or, I guess, berets? I’ve mostly gone to the film festival as an actor or husband and at Cannes Lions, I’m primarily there as an entrepreneur, which is one of my favorite French words. That and “croissant.”

When the Trump Organization said it would sell a $499 phone beginning in August that was “proudly designed and built in the United States” with some specs that beat the current top iPhone, the immediate question was: How?

The Journal’s Wilson Rothman and Ben Raab recently investigated what it would take to make an iPhone in the U.S., as it happens, and supply-chain experts agreed the U.S. would need years and many billions of dollars to establish the factories and skillsets needed.

And then the labor and infrastructure costs would be astronomical, many times higher than for the iPhone.

That may be why, despite the language in the press release, Eric Trump suggested that the first wave of T1 Phones wouldn’t be built here after all.

“You can build these phones in the United States,” the Trump son told a podcaster after holding up a gilded device that looked just like an iPhone. “Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America. We have to bring manufacturing back here.”

A new owner is reviving High Times, a longtime counterculture voice that hasn’t published a print edition since September, Josie Reich reports.

RAW rolling papers founder Josh Kesselman paid $3.5 million for the High Times intellectual property rights. He and former High Times co-owner Matt Stang are resurrecting the print magazine with special-edition releases and relaunching its flagship Cannabis Cup pot competition.

Kesselman said the company’s previous owners, private-equity firm Oreva Capital, lost buy-in from readers by focusing too much on profit. He expects the magazine to lose money initially, he said, but hopes to pick up enough business with die-hard marijuana enthusiasts to eventually break even.

“I know typically in business people have this whole plan,” Kesselman said. “But the funny part, Matt and I always tell people, is we have no plan. The most important thing to us was to actually save High Times.”

Not in Cannes? We’ve got you covered with video from Journal House:

Joanna Coles and Jim Bankoff on Leading Through Change
Daily Beast Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles and Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff joined Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker to discuss their companies’ growth strategy, the role of talent in media today and their partnerships with OpenAI.

Josh Duhamel’s Creative Journey
Josh Duhamel, actor and Dakota Media Co-Founder, and Josh Algra, Dakota Media CEO, traced the evolution of their creative production agency for CMO Today’s Katie Deighton and how their combined experience in sports, entertainment and storytelling comes into play.

Rent the Runway said its making its largest ever investment in inventory to continue the momentum after its active-subscriber numbers rebounded from a multiyear low. [WSJ] 

Meta will sell ads inside WhatsApp and let channel operators sell subscriptions. [Bloomberg]

Warner Bros. Discovery said it will “significantly reduce” CEO David Zaslav’s compensation when the company he created through a merger splits up once again. [The Wrap]

ABC is airing player intros for the NBA Finals for the first time since 2013 to pump up the pageantry for the poorly rated championship series. [Front Office Sports]

Why pro sports leagues can argue that ratings don’t matter like they used to. [Sports Media Watch]

New Balance is releasing a “Flagg Day” apparel collection just ahead of the NBA draft where  Cooper Flagg is all but guaranteed to be the first pick. [Sneaker News]

Payment network MoneyGram named Lamia Pardo as its new CMO, charged with increasing customer acquisition and retention. [O’Dwyer’s]

Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s new stop-motion campaign centers on a piece of cereal who can’t stop eating his own kind. [Ad Age]

Jell-O and Kool-Aid maker Kraft Heinz plans to remove artificial dyes from its U.S. products before the end of 2027. [WSJ]