Somewhere between the third unskippable pre-roll and the fourth sponsored post of the morning, something broke in the relationship between brands and the people they're trying to reach.

Not dramatically. The budgets kept growing, the targeting kept sharpening, the decks kept showing reach within benchmark. But the person on the other end of all that had already decided that most of it is skippable.

You know this. You've done it yourself.

Meanwhile, a selected group of brands figured out a way through. The Pink Stuff is a 60-year-old British cleaning paste with no meaningful US media budget. In 2024, while American brands collectively spent roughly $390 billion on advertising, a video of someone scrubbing a stovetop with the stuff outperformed most of it. That kind of upset is becoming the rule across categories that should have nothing to do with each other — toy companies, skincare, sleep wearables, household cleaners — and the new Entertainment Index finally puts numbers on why.

For the third year running, Tracksuit, the brand tracking platform, has released the Entertainment Index—a dissection of 16,200 American consumers ranking the brands that actually earn their keep. To separate the real icons from the background noise, they tracked performance across four pillars: Connection, Creativity, Distinctiveness, and Relatability.

At first glance, the list looks like a glitch in the simulation. You have Oura and Reese’s occupying the same strategic airspace despite budgets and categories that couldn't be further apart.

But here is the cold reality for anyone setting marketing objectives in 2026: Entertainment value has zero correlation with awareness.

You can be a household name that everyone recognizes but nobody actually likes—the corporate equivalent of a relative you’re forced to see at Christmas. Conversely, you can be a brand that 70% of the country hasn't even heard of, yet you’re sitting at the same table as Apple in terms of unaided recall.

The data proves that entertainment correlates with something far more expensive to buy and harder to obtain: Preference. Top-tier brands in the Index carry double the preference levels of those at the bottom, which means, awareness gets you an invite to the room; preference is why you’re the person everyone wants to talk to.

In a world of infinite parity, preference is the only story that ends in a transaction.

There is a fundamental difference between brands that produce entertaining content and brands that are entertainment. Most brands ship a funny TikTok, watch the vanity metrics climb, and call it a day—flattering a slide deck without actually shifting the brand. The brands at the top of the Index treat the brand itself as something the audience returns to without being prompted.

The cultural performance is showing up directly in the P&L, and the preference gap over the bottom 30 translates into the kind of organic demand that doesn't need to be re-bought every quarter through paid media. That's the moat. 

On the other hand, awareness-led brands face the "Boring Tax": as media prices inflate and attention fragments, they have to spend more every quarter just to stay invisible. The entertainers, however, build organic demand that doesn't need to be re-purchased every three months.

Four brands in the Index—a toy giant, a clinical skincare disruptor, a titanium sleep ring, and a tub of pink cleaning paste—have nothing in common except one thing: they stopped being a chaser and started being a choice.

LEGO climbed 54 spots in this year's index, owning one of the biggest single-year jumps in the entire top 10. They sit at number eight overall. Anyone who's spent a Saturday afternoon building a 3,000-piece Death Star with their kid would tell you that climb is overdue.

The numbers behind it are the kind that stop a category meeting cold. 88% aided awareness in US Children's Toys and Puzzles. 31% preference, more than double Fisher-Price at 15% and Disney at 13%, against a category average of 12%. That’s nearly a third of every preference vote in the category. The kind of dominance that gets called a moat in any other industry.

What’s interesting is who's voting. LEGO's consideration spans 18-to-24-year-olds through to 65-plus, across genders and income brackets. Those numbers reflect decades of deliberate expansion past the children's aisle — adult collectors, the Architecture series, the LEGO Fortnite universe with Epic Games, entertainment-first storytelling across streaming and games and films. The Fortnite collaboration met an audience that had already grown up inside the LEGO universe and wanted somewhere new to play.

That's what continuity buys you. Most brands are trying to "be entertaining" and treat it as a campaign. Other like LEGO have been making entertainment for 90 years. Fortnite is just the latest chapter in LEGO's 90-year case that imagination scales. LEGO's competitive threat at this point is less about other toy companies and more about keeping pace with entertainment formats that keep mutating underneath everyone.

CeraVe sits at number 18 in the index. The commercial trajectory behind that ranking is some of the most revealing data in the entire report.

84% aided awareness in US skincare, tied with Neutrogena at the top of the category. That's the price of admission but the conversion rate is the real story. CeraVe turns awareness into consideration at 74% — the highest in skincare, 16 points above the category average of 58%. Roughly seven out of every 10 people who know CeraVe go on to consider it. That kind of efficiency is rare at this level of recognition. Most brands at the top of a category lose people somewhere between recognition and the cart.

Tracksuit's purchase driver data makes it specific.The single most important association for consideration in US skincare is "is a relevant brand," rated three times more important than any other factor. CeraVe scores 64% on it. Relevance is what matters: the brand connects with people, not just sells to them. The second most important driver is "is a brand that makes me happy when interacting with it," and the emotional warmth CeraVe built through TikTok dermatologist content and stunts like hiring Kevin Durant as the unexpected face of leg care shows up in the numbers, not just the comments.

The brand walked a line most heritage skincare names couldn't manage. Dermatological credibility on one side, internet-native personality on the other, neither one undercutting the other. The product still has the ceramides; the brand also has a sense of humor about itself and a recognizable point of view that comes through in every post. You can tell a CeraVe post is a CeraVe post before you see the logo, which is a working definition of brand equity and consistency in a feed.

One tension worth watching as the brand scales: "is a brand that would be difficult to replace in my life" sits at 27%. This means that the loyalty beneath them is thinner than the funnel implies. CeraVe has mastered the moment of consideration but building irreplaceability is another game entirely. Still, the entertainment work that got them here is the foundation that makes that next chapter possible.

Oura ranks 27th in the index. The position is both earned and telling: a sub-$300 ring sitting in a list with Hershey's, Heinz, and Amazon.

The brand stepped away from every category cliché on its way here. The wellness aesthetic — yoga asana photography, sunlit retreats, aspirational mountaintops — never appeared in Oura's marketing. It positioned itself as a hard luxury accessory that happens to track your sleep, and the combination worked in ways the headline numbers don't fully grasp.

Aided awareness sits at 30%, below the wearables competitor average of 41% and well behind Apple at 65%. On unaided awareness — the harder metric, where someone actually thinks of you without prompting — Oura runs at 7%. Category average is 6%, Samsung sits at 2% and Resmed at 3%. 

For a brand most Americans haven't heard of, Oura punches well above its weight on the metric that predicts who someone considers when they have a problem to solve.

That gap between aided and unaided awareness is the entire story of entertainment-driven brand-building. Aided awareness measures advertising's job: did our message reach you. Unaided awareness measures preference's job: did you remember us when nobody reminded you. Oura built a brand people actually think about, in a category where most competitors are functional commodities with logos stuck on them.

The next chapter is harder to fake. Oura scores 32% on "is a brand I trust," below the wearables average of 49% and meaningfully behind Resmed at 64%, Samsung at 61%, and Apple at 60%. For a wearable that tracks your sleep, your heart rate, and your recovery every night, that number deserves to sit with you for a moment. Cultural cachet built it but the next stage requires something else — quiet, clinical consistency demonstrated over years rather than launched through cultural moments. When hype vanishes, also many brand strategies.

The good news is Oura now has the kind of preference base that gives it permission to build that trust on its own terms. Plenty of category-defining brands would pay handsomely to be in that position.

The Pink Stuff sits at number 19. A cleaning brand, holding its own in a list dominated by toy companies, snack brands, and skincare. The brand health data explains why it shouldn't feel surprising.

Household cleaners cover 86% of American adults. The addressable market is essentially everyone with a kitchen. The Pink Stuff has 26% awareness in that category — modest in absolute terms, more meaningful in trajectory. Preference grew 2 percentage points year over year, with the strongest gains among 25-to-34-year-olds and the Pacific region — exactly the demographics TikTok cleaning content reaches. Preference is the hardest funnel metric to move, and the strongest indicator of repeat purchase.

The competitive context tells the rest. Clorox leads category preference at 35%, Lysol sits at 28%, and Windex at 11%. The Pink Stuff lands at 3%, tied with Mrs. Meyers. Those are brands that have spent decades earning their place in the default cart, the product people reach for without thinking too much about it. The Pink Stuff is competing in that conversation as a 60-year-old British cleaning paste with no juicy media budget, having earned its way into the algorithm one filmed stovetop transformation at a time.

This is the most overlooked promise of entertainment-driven brand-building — the slow, compounding accumulation of preference in a category that wasn't supposed to care. Clorox sells through a hundred years of inherited habit but The Pink Stuff is selling through something newer: the kind of trust that comes from watching a stranger demonstrate the product in their own kitchen, then quietly putting it on your shopping list. The shelf is a longer game. At this stage, trajectory is the metric to watch.

A toy company sustained by 90 years of imaginative permission, a skincare brand that turned dermatological credibility into a bold personality, a sleep ring outperforming its category on the metric that matters, and a cleaning paste competing against brands a hundred times its size on cultural relevance. The four have nothing in common at the category level — what they share is a mechanism. They’re all built by entertainment value. That’s the kind of brand equity that survives a quarterly miss, a category disruption, a pricing war, or a fading trend.

This is where the report’s true value lies. The Entertainment Index draws on Tracksuit’s always-on brand tracking platform, which continuously measures awareness, consideration, preference, and competitive position across categories. Because these brands are tracked monthly, we are looking beyond a single data point; instead, we are seeing the literal trajectory of preference for brands like The Pink Stuff. This methodology is a massive advantage when tracking how entertainment actually moves the needle in your brand strategy.

Explore the full Entertainment Index 2026 rankings and insights. 

Also, another damning finding in the entire Entertainment Index is that awareness and entertainment value are uncorrelated. 

Your level of brand fame does not guarantee you’re considered an entertaining actor for your audience. The reverse turns out to be more useful—being entertaining can make you the brand someone reaches for first, even if half the country hasn't heard of you yet. Preference is the leading indicator now.

For everyone still operating on the old paradigms, the question grows more uncomfortable than the awareness model ever made it. Showing the work to enough people used to be the whole job. Now the question is whether your people choose to spend ten minutes with your brand if they aren't pushed to do so. This is what matters in 2026.

LEGO has an answer. CeraVe, Oura, and The Pink Stuff each have their own. That kind of answer is what compounds this year—meanwhile, paid media costs keep rising, and the audience keeps getting better at ignoring it.

The Entertainment Index draws on Tracksuit's always-on brand tracking platform, which continuously measures awareness, consideration, preference, and competitive position across categories. The brands covered here are tracked monthly, which is how you see a preference trajectory for The Pink Stuff rather than a single data point.