General News

NEW YORK – September 30, 2026 -- Eighty-six percent of advertisers say slow audience fulfillment could cause them to cut spending or abandon a retail media network partner, according to GrowthLoop's 2026 Commerce Media Investment Index. The study, conducted with Ascend2, surveyed nearly 300 U.S. and Canadian marketing professionals involved in retail media network (RMN) or commerce media network (CMN) advertising decisions.

Advertisers will pay more for faster data delivery

Eighty-five percent of respondents say they would pay a premium for same-day audience fulfillment, while 92% would increase spend with faster activation. Ninety-four percent said they would likely spend more with partners offering self-service audience-building tools. Advertisers reporting the strongest ROI are five times more likely than others to receive custom audiences the same day.

Santa Clara, Calif. – September 30, 2026 -- The producer price index for new nonresidential construction inputs climbed 8.4% year over year through May 2026, the steepest annual increase since the pandemic period, according to DPR Construction's latest Market Conditions Report.

Cross-sector demand strains shared labor and supply pools

DPR Construction, a self-performing contractor, finds that investment across digital infrastructure, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, transportation and energy is pulling from the same pools of electricians, mechanical trades, commissioning specialists and field leaders. Projects that appear unrelated on paper are increasingly tied together through overlapping resource demands, the report states.

Miami – September 30, 2026 -- Analysis of more than 2.5 million boats across Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia found that just 6% to 13% of repeat buyers stay with the same manufacturer on their next purchase, according to new data from Boats Group.

Repeat owners make up a quarter of the market but rarely return to the same brand

Boats Group identified approximately 637,000 repeat owners—those associated with two or more boats—among the records studied. Repeat owners represented 25.6% of owners in Florida, 31.3% in Ohio, 20.6% in Virginia, and 18.0% in Texas. Despite this scale, brand loyalty on the next purchase ranged from just 6% to 13% across all four states.

Washington, D.C. – September 30, 2026 -- GE Aerospace has donated $1 million to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum to reopen two dedicated classrooms for aerospace education, timed to coincide with the museum's 50th anniversary.

New classrooms expect to serve hundreds of students annually

The GE Aerospace Classrooms will function as hands-on learning spaces where K-12 students experiment with aerospace concepts using the museum's collection. The funding also covers staffing for a museum educator who will run reservable, object-based field trips called "Museum Labs" at the Washington location.

Cambridge, Mass. – September 30, 2026 -- Biopharma companies are losing time and money to a recurring pattern of disconnected experiments and manual data reconciliation that Zifo calls the 'DMTA doom loop,' according to a new position paper from the scientific informatics firm.

Zifo identifies a structural flaw in the Design-Make-Test-Analyse process

The paper, titled 'The Billion-Dollar Bottleneck: Why CMC Is Strangling the Biopharma Pipeline,' argues that the DMTA cycle used in chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC) work is forced into a rigid, linear execution model rather than adapting to what the science actually requires. Zifo says evidence in many CMC environments is scattered across scientific applications, instruments, spreadsheets, PDFs, batch records and individual expertise, forcing scientists to reconstruct experimental histories and decision reasoning before they can even begin new work.

Norman, Oklahoma – September 30, 2026 -- Nextep has been named to the 2026 Fortune Best Workplaces in Consulting & Professional ServicesTM list, marking the professional employer organization's seventh consecutive year on the ranking from Great Place to Work® and Fortune magazine.

96% of Nextep employees rate the company a great workplace, far above the 57% national average

The list is compiled from survey responses of nearly 149,000 employees at Great Place To Work CertifiedTM companies in the consulting and professional services sector. Great Place To Work®'s broader annual study draws on more than 1.3 million survey responses and data from companies employing over 8.4 million people, using its Trust IndexTM methodology to evaluate workplace outcomes across job roles, race, gender, sexual orientation and work status.

New York – September 30, 2026 -- The Women's Sports Foundation (WSF) has released its inaugural WSF Sport Report 2026, a new annual benchmark tracking girls' and women's sports participation from youth leagues through professional and Olympic competition.

Girls pay 25% more than boys to participate in organized sports

Median annual sports spending is $500 for girls compared with $400 for boys, according to the report. Cost is an even greater barrier for girls from lower-income households, who are more than twice as likely as their peers to cite expense as the reason they have never played.

54% of girls who have never played say they want to, nearly matching boys at 52%

Despite similar interest levels, actual participation diverges: 45% of girls ages 8-18 currently play organized sports versus 52% of boys, based on a YouGov survey of more than 6,100 U.S. parents and 3,065 children conducted May 28-June 15, 2026.

Stamford, Conn. – September 30, 2026 -- Philip Morris International's U.S. businesses (PMI U.S.) donated $340,000 to four military relief societies, bringing its cumulative giving to these organizations to $1,220,000. The recipients are Air & Space Forces Aid Society, Army Emergency Relief, Coast Guard Mutual Assistance, and Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society.

Only 31 percent of military families say they are getting the support they need right now

PMI U.S. cited new data showing the gap in support as an increasing number of service members are actively engaged in conflicts around the globe, underscoring the case for the funding.

Durham, N.C. – September 30, 2026 -- Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults said they would or might let an AI shopping assistant choose brands on their behalf if it consistently saved them 20% on purchases, according to a nationwide survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by Talker Research on behalf of payments platform Spreedly.

The findings arrive as AI shopping agents, including Meta's newly launched Muse, expand from product discovery into checkout, intensifying scrutiny over how much purchasing authority consumers will cede to automated systems.

Younger consumers show the weakest brand loyalty against AI-driven savings

Thirty-four percent of Gen Z and 30% of Millennials said they would abandon brand loyalty if an AI assistant consistently found the best products at the lowest prices. Among parents with children under five, 60% said they would let AI select brands for a consistent 20% savings.

Mutsamudu, Comoros – September 30, 2026 -- MEXC recorded the highest order book liquidity at market price for both SOL and DOGE among eight exchanges surveyed in CoinGecko Research's 2026 Crypto Liquidity on CEXes Report, which tracked the top five non-stablecoin assets over 60 days from July 6 to September 3, 2026.

MEXC posts $934,000 in SOL liquidity at market price, the study's top figure

CoinGecko found SOL liquidity more evenly distributed across venues in 2026 than the prior year, even as overall depth declined. MEXC held the lead at the immediate market price, though Bitget and Coinbase overtook it beyond the ±$0.20 range, indicating a more fragmented competitive field for SOL execution.