August 24, 2026

Alfa-Investments, the brokerage and IIS platform run by Alfa-Bank, raised its monthly target actions from about 50 to 3,500 through a campaign built with agency Rafinad, part of Kokoc Group. The team worked with 258 bloggers on Telegram, VKontakte and Max, offering gift certificates as an incentive to open a brokerage account and make a first deposit. Each blogger folded the offer into their regular content in their own tone of voice, presenting it as a personal recommendation. Rafinad tracked application volume, traffic quality and placement performance in real time through its CPA platform and shifted budget toward the strongest combinations as results came in. Over 17 days, the bloggers published 451 placements. Elena Khusnutdinova, head of blogger marketing at Rafinad, said the campaign showed an investment product can scale through influencers with little loss of audience quality.

Amazon filed a petition with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, asking for a rehearing before 11 judges after a three-judge panel lifted an injunction against Perplexity's Comet shopping assistant. The dispute began in November, when Amazon accused Comet of placing orders on Amazon.com with shoppers' saved credentials despite technical blocks and a cease-and-desist letter. In March, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney sided with Amazon, finding it likely to prove Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and ordered Comet blocked from the site. The appellate panel reversed that ruling last month, finding that users access Amazon's servers themselves when the assistant carries out purchases on their behalf, with Perplexity limited to relaying screenshots and instructions. Amazon's new filing argues that Perplexity's "reasoning layer" makes the decision to enter the Amazon store and submit stored credentials, even for requests as generic as an order for paper towels.

Sixty-seven percent of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, according to Gartner research cited in a Digiday sponsored analysis of B2B marketing data. The piece links that shift to a wider data problem. A 2026 Adobe AI and Digital Trends Report found 96% of marketers already use AI in their roles, and only 44% rate their organization's data quality and accessibility as adequate for it. A separate 2026 Demand Gen Report found 44% of marketers say first-party data improves their customer insight, while 18% name incomplete data as their biggest barrier to confident decision-making. Buyer signals such as intent data, campaign engagement and sales activity typically sit in separate platforms, so marketing and sales teams each work from a partial view of the buying journey. Digiday's piece calls the proposed fix account orchestration, a coordinated approach connecting people, signals and channels so organizations can respond to buyer intent consistently.

Google integrated Google Analytics with Google Business Profiles on Tuesday, adding local engagement data such as phone calls, direction requests, bookings, website clicks, messages, and menu views to standard web and app reports. Businesses link a GA property to a Business Profile through the Administration panel, with no tag changes required. Google Business Profile data appears in a dedicated Reports collection and covers a rolling six-month window; for date ranges beyond that, GA shows the most recent available data. The integration brings seven Business Profile metrics into GA dashboards, letting marketers see Search and Maps activity alongside broader cross-channel performance. Google has left open whether a property can link more than one profile, though its documentation suggests multi-location businesses can connect several.

Reports indicate Alex Cooper's functional beverage brand Unwell will close later this year, less than two years after it launched with Nestlé and was distributed primarily through Target. Cooper's wider Unwell media business recently raised funding at a $500m valuation and reaches 70m women a month, the company says. Writing in The Drum, brand strategist Jono Wylie argues the closure shows that creator attention alone cannot sustain a product line: Unwell combined Gen Z relevance, corporate backing and a booming functional beverage category, yet still folded. Wylie draws a parallel with Logan Paul and KSI's Prime, which he says has faded from its early peak, and with Liquid Death, which grew into a $1.4bn business before pausing international expansion, including in the UK. Wylie's core question: how many people would miss a product once it disappears?

Sky Sports has turned its 'Welcome to the Show' tagline into a full brand positioning ahead of a season showing 1,500 live matches across the Premier League, EFL, WSL and Scottish Premiership. Group executive creative director Ceri Sampson says the line worked well last year without a clear rationale, so the team defined 'welcome' as inclusivity and 'the show' as production value, then built a campaign around both ideas. The work includes six national posters plus 20 club-specific executions, each adapted to local fanbases, alongside a 30-second spot following ordinary fans through match-day rituals. AI helped generate storyboards and animatics in under a day, work Sampson says used to take a week, and rendered a stadium fireworks finale that would have been costly to shoot live. A 3D activation at Piccadilly Lights used robotic arms to imprint a ball with campaign messaging.

Consumers are already researching flu symptoms, treatments, wellness solutions and household essentials as the 2026 flu season approaches, according to Comscore's Proximic unit. Proximic has published a 2026 Flu Season Guide that describes AI-driven contextual and predictive audience segments built around that activity, covering flu-fighters, caregivers, wellness shoppers and health-conscious consumers. Proximic says the segments help brands identify where health-related intent is emerging, so they can reach those consumers "at the moments that matter most." The guide includes ready-to-activate audiences and customizable solutions that Proximic describes as designed to drive stronger outcomes throughout flu season. It is available as a download from Comscore's site for teams planning health and wellness campaigns this season.

Founder Ajay Mehta says Tolan, his two-year-old AI companion app, has passed 100,000 paying subscribers. Its most popular subscription tier costs $25 a month, putting the app on a run rate above $10 million. Speaking on the My First Million podcast, Mehta said Tolan's core paying audience turned out to be women aged 35 to 45 across the Midwest, many of them moms who discovered the app through cooking demos. Mehta called the demographic a surprise: "We set out to build an AI companion, and Midwestern moms showed up." Users customize a character called a Tolan, Mehta's own is named Swami, and talk to it by voice for over 70% of messages, compared with roughly 90 to 95% text on ChatGPT. Mehta credits the app's memory of user details, like a child's allergy or an upcoming camp deadline, as the product's real advantage.

Google is letting publishers embed a new 'Preferred Sources' button directly on their own websites, giving readers a one-click way to mark a site as a favorite across Google Search, Discover and Google News. The company said that as of its May rollout of Preferred Sources for AI Mode and AI Overviews, people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through the feature. The option first appeared in Top Stories before expanding to those AI-driven experiences. Google says people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when one is available, and the new embeddable button is meant to help publishers recover some of the traffic AI-powered search has taken from them. Google also plans to let readers customize their Discover feed with natural language commands and to offer customizable audio news briefings for Android users.

Lenta is negotiating to acquire Maria-Ra, the largest retail chain in Siberia, according to Izvestia. Maria-Ra operates more than 3,000 stores across the Altai Krai, the Altai Republic, and the Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, and Tomsk regions. Its operating company, Roznitsa K-1, generated over 127 billion rubles in revenue in 2025, ranking 18th among Russian retailers. Analysts value the asset between 40 and 60 billion rubles, with the price falling to around 38 billion once debt is factored in. The Rakshin family, led by founder Alexander Rakshin, owns the business. A deal would move Lenta into the top three grocery retailers next year and close the gap with X5 and Magnit. Lenta currently holds fourth place with quarterly revenue of about 307 billion rubles, trailing third-placed Mercury Retail Holding's 409 billion. The chain would also inherit distribution centers in Novoaltaysk and Kemerovo.