 Shakespeare at the Hotel du Cap: If exiled MediaLink founder Michael Kassan — with his big parties and bigger feud with his old partners at UTA — didn’t exist, the media might have to invent him. But this feud only goes so far. His daughter, Brett Kassan Smith, a managing director at MediaLink, has continued to run events for the company despite its ongoing arbitration with her father over his departure earlier this year. Kassan has told friends he’s proud of the job she’s done running some of the week’s hottest parties, at the MediaLink Beach and Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Missing Will Lewis: The Washington Post publisher is a perennial in Cannes — last year, he was here talking about buying the Telegraph — but his absence amid a newsroom furor over his ethics at home has really made him the talk of the town.  Elliott O'Donovan for The Washington Post via GettyTipsters in Washington tell us that he’s still trying to sell the Post masthead on bringing in the deputy editor of the Telegraph, Rob Winnett, to run the place. But even before you get to the ethical scandals, “deputy editor of the Telegraph” sounds, to the American ear, like bringing in the offensive coordinator of a high school football team to run the New York Giants. (Sorry everyone! Anglo-American tensions are running high! In other transatlantic news, American readers will be pleased to learn that the British magazine Private Eye has long referred to the new Post chief as Will “Thirsty” Lewis.) Meanwhile, the Post’s caretaker EIC, Matt Murray, has remarked to colleagues that running a whole newspaper is a surefire route to burnout — but perhaps he’s just being modest. The main question in Cannes, though, was whether Lewis would survive his new Post post. That’s really a question for Jeff Bezos — who, as an executive who worked with him for years noted to us at Cannes, hates caving to public pressure and won’t want to be seen as giving in to the newsroom. And yet, a big part of the man’s job is to sell ads, and he’s manifestly not selling ads this week. Brand politics:  A new study from Edelman finds that consumers increasingly expect brands to take a stand. Next Nextdoor: Nextdoor’s co-founder and newly reappointed CEO, Nirav Tolia, suggested that the big, messy platform could wade into the local news business as it looks to radically change its identity in the coming months. Nextdoor “hasn’t had a great product in the last couple of years,” he said in an interview with Semafor at the Hotel Martinez rooftop on Monday. “When you lose your dog, you go to Nextdoor. You need a plumber, when you hear a loud noise, whatever — most of the conversation [on Nextdoor] is driven by intent,” he said. “Those news sources that you use in the morning, they’re not intent-centric. They are discovery-centric. But the reason I go every morning is because I want to discover something interesting,” he said. Tolia said that while Nextdoor was built during the 2010s around suburban living, the company plans to refocus itself next year to cater to urban audiences. The platform has some bugs to work out. A recent New York University study showed that the vast majority of Nextdoor’s content is driven by local service needs, but posts reporting potentially suspicious people or activities receive the highest engagement. — Max Tani Mad Men, the game: Vox Media created a special Mad Men-themed version of its Cinematrix game in honor of Cannes Lions.
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