MDM Blog

MDM’s August Premium Monthly Intelligence Brief is Here

Our newly-revamped Premium Monthly report — formerly a PDF often spanning 30-40 pages — provides a consise, synthesized eight-page briefing that extracts the biggest takeaways and themes from the articles published each month. It's perfect for busy executives. Premium members can get our August Intelligence Brief here or from their Premium Dashboard.

September 2, 2026

The latest downloadable offering from MDM Premium is now available in the form of our August Premium Monthly Intelligence Brief.

If you’re an MDM Premium subscriber, you may have wondered what happened to our Premium Monthly PDF report that showed all of our articles from each month in one PDF. Those PDFs were huge, often 30-40 pages depending on the number of articles and their length, and it was dense to page through to find the specific article you might be looking for.

So, earlier this summer we worked through revising this asset into what a downloadable monthly Premium content report could and should look like, and out of that, we’ve created MDM’s Premium Monthly Intelligence Brief.

We know our Premium readers don’t have time to read every word of Premium content MDM publishes each month, so we’ve evolved our former Premium Monthly PDF into this briefing — a concise, executive-friendly report designed to provide a quick glance at the month’s content and the key takeaways from each article. Whereas Premium Monthly was regularly 30+ pages in its previous format, our August report packages the key takeaways in eight. It is intended to give distribution executives a timely download of the best of MDM’s Premium reporting, helping you quickly absorb the ideas, trends and strategic signals that mattered most during the month. Meanwhile, readers are still able to quickly view each article in-full with just one click from their hyperlinks.

Premium members can download their August Intelligence Brief here

Not a Premium member? Change that here to access the best of MDM’s content.

Our 10 August Premium articles covered the following:

Part 2 of Nelson Valderrama’s analysis of NAW survey data about the gap between supplier cost increases and distributor’s pricing
Why model routing is the key advantage against hidden costs of AI agents
What buyers want in a more selective distribution M&A market
Our monthly MDM Forecast that provides an updated annual revenue outlook for 20 different product sectors
Our research about distributors’ current factors driving both optimism and concern over the next 12 months
Why construction estimates fail and how distributors can make them more reliable
An analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest wholesale trade sales and inventory data (through June 2026)
Our research into what distributors and manufacturers want each other to improve upon the most
What the takeaway should be from Amazon returning a considerable portion of its tariff refund to consumers, and if distributors should follow suit
August’s M&A Roundup

With MDM being a part of NAW, NAW members have complimentary access to MDM Premium. If you’re an NAW member, you should activate your Premium subscription here if you haven’t already.