AB InBev, Compare the Market, Luxury Escapes, Nestlé Purina, Pizza Hut, Ridery, Wealthsimple and Wendy’s awarded for turning innovation into impact

Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE), the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™, today announced the winners of its 2026 Torchie Awards, recognizing brands and marketers setting a new standard for customer engagement through creativity, collaboration, AI, and measurable business impact.

The winners were unveiled Monday evening at Forge, Braze’s annual customer engagement conference in Las Vegas. This year’s winners bring the Forge theme, ‘Made for This,’ to life by showing how marketers, who are adaptive and resilient by nature, are embracing new technologies, customer insight and creativity to solve real business problems and build stronger customer relationships.

"The work recognized by the Torchies gives marketers something much more valuable than a list of award winners. It gives them a blueprint for what great customer engagement can look like," said Will Crocker Hay, VP Growth, Braze. "These teams are taking ideas that can sometimes feel abstract, whether that is AI, real-time personalization or cross-functional collaboration, and turning them into experiences customers actually value and results their businesses can measure. That spirit is exactly what we mean by Made for This."

From AI Experimentation to Business Results

Compare the Market received the AI in Action Award after deploying BrazeAI Decisioning Studio in just 57 days for car insurance renewals. Its approach coordinated six decisions for each customer simultaneously across more than 195 content modules, creating more than 1 million personalised experiences for a customer base of 34 million. Not only did this improve customer experience, it delivered a 9.07% conversion increase against business as usual, subsequently rising to 17%. CRM's contribution to revenue grew 55% over nine months despite 25% fewer sends.

"Winning AI in Action means a great deal to our team because this work was never about using AI for the sake of it," said Saul Lopes, Head of Customer Marketing & Engagement, Compare the Market. "We wanted to create better renewal experiences for our customers while proving that greater relevance can also deliver stronger commercial results. Being recognized alongside other brands pushing customer engagement forward makes this especially meaningful."

The result reflects a broader pattern across this year’s winners: the most effective uses of AI start with a clear customer or business challenge and apply technology where it can create measurable value.

Creativity Customers Want to Engage With

The Campaign of the Year Award went to AB InBev, SAB/Brahma for a Zé Delivery initiative that connected purchases of Brahma with Brazilian football fandom. Ten percent of the value of qualifying orders was directed toward customers’ chosen football clubs, ultimately generating more than R21million in investment from more than one million fans. The campaign also generated more than R30 million in incremental revenue and increased average spend per Brahma order by 30%.

"This campaign gave users a simple and meaningful way to support the football clubs they love through their purchases," said Leandro Nakajima, Product Manager, AB InBev. "By bringing together Brahma, Zé Delivery, our consumers and their passion for football, we generated meaningful investment for clubs while driving measurable growth for the business. Being recognized as Campaign of the Year is a great recognition of the creativity and impact behind the campaign."

Wendy’s won the Creative Excellence Award for its Meal of Misfortune activation with Netflix’s Wednesday. The campaign extended into Wendy’s customer engagement channels and an interactive in-app tarot experience, leading to the creation of 1.1 million new loyalty accounts, seven million tarot interactions and 311,000 incremental loyalty purchasers.

The Teams and Marketers Behind the Technology

Wealthsimple was named Collaborative Team of the Year for bringing marketing and engineering teams together to build its Monthly Millionaire experience. The program shipped in two months and attracted more than one million participants in its first month.

Monthly Millionaire showed what is possible when marketing and engineering work together around a shared customer idea," said Julian Mirijello, Manager, Growth, Wealthsimple. "We moved from concept to launch in two months and saw more than one million people participate in the first month. Being named Collaborative Team of the Year is meaningful recognition of the people across Wealthsimple who made that happen."

Sarah Lands Ramrup of Nestlé Purina received Marketing Leader of the Year recognition for work that helped demonstrate the value of Braze across the organization. A 2026 program targeting a 15% conversion rate delivered 24% in the first quarter, while Decisioning Studio cross-sell activity produced approximately 28% lift against holdout.

Zahra Khan of Pizza Hut was named Rising Marketing Star after earning the highest-scoring submission across the six judged categories. In two years, Khan has taken ownership of work spanning Hut Rewards, AI decisioning and customer engagement mechanics, including a six-phase loyalty journey delivered without incremental headcount.

Customer Engagement With an Impact Beyond Marketing

The Braze for Impact Award went to Ridery for a real-time earthquake alert system created following a major earthquake in Venezuela. Built in less than 24 hours and connected to USGS seismic data, the system was designed to alert users in affected cities within seconds rather than sending a blanket notification to Ridery’s entire customer base. It has since become permanent infrastructure designed to activate automatically following future earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater.

Nirnay Polaboina of Luxury Escapes was named Bonfire Community Leader of the Year for sharing expertise with the wider Braze practitioner community, including technical guidance, articles and examples of customer engagement practices spanning international markets.

Partners Turning Innovation Into Customer Impact

The 2026 Torchies also recognized six Braze partners whose work demonstrates how collaboration across the customer engagement ecosystem can help brands solve complex challenges, accelerate transformation and turn technology into stronger customer and business outcomes. The partner awards recognize excellence spanning campaigns, delivery, technology collaboration and business transformation.

WPP was named Delivery Partner of the Year, recognizing the scale and maturity of its Braze practice and its ability to translate that expertise into measurable customer outcomes. WPP grew Braze Certifications across its organization by 88% year over year, achieved Platinum partner status and served as a launch partner for BrazeAI Agent Console™, demonstrating how investment in skills and emerging technology can help brands put new customer engagement capabilities to work.

Databricks received Technology Partner of the Year following a year of rapid collaboration with Braze. In less than six months, the companies co-designed, validated and launched a zero-copy data-sharing integration in beta, while Braze became an official Databricks Data Partner. The partnership has seen the number of mutual brands grow to more than 185 shared customers, demonstrating the opportunity to bring customer data and activation closer together.

Stitch, together with RaceTrac, received Partner Campaign of the Year for a campaign that combined creativity with sophisticated technical orchestration. The winning submission brought together the Databricks and Braze agent integration, Figma and eight different Braze features and channels to help RaceTrac move beyond its traditional customer engagement playbook.

CACI, together with Legal & General, won Transformation Partner of the Year for building a Customer Engagement Engine that brought together Snowflake, Tealium, Optimizely CMS with Braze to replace a fragmented legacy marketing technology stack. The transformation increased registrations and logins by 217%, meaningful customer actions by 220% and transfer completion rates by 50%, demonstrating how modernizing the underlying customer engagement infrastructure can translate into significant changes in customer behavior and business performance.

Furthermore, Composed Digital and Massive Rocket were recognised for their regional excellence with a Market Maker award.

The Torchie Awards recognize Braze customers and partners whose work demonstrates innovation, measurable impact and a stronger approach to customer engagement. To learn more about the 2026 Torchie Award winners and their work, visit https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/2026-torchie-awards-winners.

To learn more about Forge, visit https://forge.braze.com/2026/.

About Braze

Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™. Braze helps brands deliver great customer experiences that drive value both for consumers and for their businesses. Built on a foundation of composable intelligence, BrazeAI™ allows marketers to combine and activate AI agents, models, and features at every touchpoint throughout the Braze Customer Engagement Platform for smarter, faster, and more meaningful customer engagement. From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to AI-powered decisioning and optimization, Braze enables companies to turn action into interaction through autonomous, 1:1 personalized experiences. The company has been consistently recognized as a Leader in marketing technology by industry analysts and was named a G2 "Best of Marketing and Digital Advertising Software Product" in 2026. Braze was also named one of Built In’s 2026 Best Places to Work, one of America’s Greenest Companies for 2025 by Newsweek, and a 2025 Fortune Best Workplace in Technology™ by Great Place To Work®. The company is headquartered in New York with 15 offices across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Learn more at braze.com.

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Steve Ballerini

Press@braze.com