Good morning. This is Katie Deighton filling in for Nat Ives. Today, a Wall Street Journal investigation finds that Polymarket flooded social media with deceptive ads by paid creators.

Prediction market Polymarket paid dozens of college-age creators to film themselves making fake trades, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal's Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff, Neil Mehta and Brenna T. Smith.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket flooded social media with videos that appear to show young people making winning bets on its platform. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

Telltale signs the trades were fake included shots of the creatively misspelled URL poiymarket.com.

Polymarket said in a statement that it was committed to maintaining accurate, fair and transparent markets. It said it plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of active promotional content.

Marketing industry watchers know that undisclosed promotions and truth-stretching ads are nothing new. But the WSJ investigation shows the speed at which a virality-at-all-costs strategy can now spread deceptive marketing across the internet.

Polymarket employs marketing firm Virality to manage an army of clippers, who redistribute paid creators’ videos across other accounts. Polymarket’s clipping campaign racked up more than 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to analytics provider Tubular.

Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal. 

CMO Today’s Megan Graham writes...

Ulta Beauty CMO Kelly Mahoney has a few beauty tips for those of you in Cannes this week.

“A lot of dry shampoo, a lot of texture spray … you want as much texture spray in your hair as you possibly can, so that it doesn't have any option,” she said. Cannes-goers also should have sunscreen at the ready, along with setting spray so long days of hobnobbing don’t turn a full beat into a full meltdown. (She usually goes with an SPF setting spray from Kopari.)

I visited Mahoney last week at the beauty retailer’s headquarters in Bolingbrook, Illinois, where we chatted about how the brand is thinking about AI. The technology informs what it recommends to its 47 million loyalty members, and Ulta is in the early stages of figuring out how in-store associates can use that information to help make recommendations to shoppers.

The company last week released a study about how Gen Alpha consumers are navigating beauty and wellness in a world where they’re increasingly using AI. One interesting finding, according to Mahoney: “The teenage boy is as passionate as the teenage girl about beauty. They're coming at it very differently,” she said. “They're leaning on AI to help them even more than the teenage girl. And I speculate that it's private, it's personal. … That's really intriguing to us.”

Ulta is also trying to best show up on LLMs using lots and lots of content.

“In our business, we’ve got to be showing up in social because that's where beauty is happening, that's where the conversation's happening,” she said. “I have to have so much content that can appeal to a variety of people.”

Dispatches from friends who arrived at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity over the weekend amounted to: “It's really hot.”

France has issued red heatwave alerts for around half the country as temperatures hit 104 degrees in the southwestern city of Bordeaux. Temperatures in coastally located Cannes are set to climb to 90 degrees throughout the week—a breeze to deal with in a Las Vegas ballroom, but much less fun in a quaint French apartment sans air conditioning.

Spare a thought in particular for the group of roaming promoters Reddit has dressed in aprons stuffed with baguettes to advertise its branded deli.

The Journal House is open through Thursday on the Croisette. Meanwhile...

Omnicom Media announced a partnership with Netflix. [Digiday]

Anthropic, The Ordinary, Icelandair and Life360 topped the list of predicted Cannes Lions award-winners. [The Drum]

Anheuser-Busch InBev, Mastercard and Coca-Cola featured in the 10 brands shortlisted for the inaugural Creative Brand Lions contest. [AdAge]

More than 250 creators are expected to attend the festival this year, jostling for brand deals, paid speaking gigs and VIP party invites. [Business Insider]

The new Bed Bath & Beyond is accepting old paper coupons again, and running a contest to find the oldest. [WSJ]

Finally, some good news from Hollywood: Total domestic box office so far this year is at its highest since 2019. [WSJ]

Back-to-school deals are arriving before the school year ends. [WSJ]

Buyers of consumer electronics are getting hit by rising costs of memory and storage chips. [WSJ]

How Pizza Hut lost its grasp on the U.S. market. [WSJ]

P&G continues to push Tide tiles on bewildered consumers. [WSJ]