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Entertain or die. I know that sounds dramatic. But I've been sitting with this idea for a while now and the more I look at the data, the less dramatic it feels.

We're past the point where showing up is enough. Your audience has gotten so good at ignoring advertising that the brands actually cutting through aren't the ones with the biggest budgets — they're the ones people would genuinely choose to spend time with. That's a different game entirely.

Small World and Tracksuit recently dropped the Entertainment Index 2026, and it's the first time I've seen real numbers put behind something I think we've all felt but struggled to prove in a deck. The data covers 16,200 Americans, four brand pillars, and one finding that should change how you think about your media mix: entertaining brands earn double the consumer preference of boring ones.

Using Tracksuit's data, we get under the skin of four brands that figured this out — and what the numbers actually say about how they did it.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

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.

👉 Read the full piece

Unless you've been living completely off the internet for the past five years, you've heard of SKIMS — Kim Kardashian's shapewear and loungewear brand that somehow managed to make the category feel genuinely contemporary, built a $5 billion valuation, and is now circling an IPO with the kind of momentum that makes fashion industry veterans quietly furious because nobody saw it coming.

But Kim Kardashian is just the surface.

Jens and Emma Grede are still largely invisible to the public, and that gap between their total obscurity and their extraordinary influence is, when you actually sit with it, one of the more fascinating dynamics in fashion right now. While the Kardashians exist at maximum visibility, the Gredes are building in the opposite direction — quietly, methodically, with the kind of long-game focus that doesn't survive a personal brand. Just a holding company called Popular Culture, a portfolio worth several billion dollars, and two people the industry has never actually met.

👉 Read the full piece

Another World Cup ad, another feature. I don't want to speak in hyperbole. But I will. This is the best brand film I've seen in years. And Timothée Chalamet proves again why he's the next DiCaprio — a performance that draws you in with that Marty supreme energy.

Backyard Legends is a five-minute film with Chalamet assembling a team to beat Clive, Ruthie and Isaak — a neighbourhood trio unbeaten since 1996. Messi's there. Bellingham. Lamine Yamal. Trinity Rodman. Bad Bunny. AI-rendered younger versions of Zidane, Beckham and Del Piero show up and lose. It hit 56 million views in five days.

Why it matters: The film never mentions the World Cup once. Adidas is the official ball provider and kit supplier to fourteen federations — the pressure to sell that must have been enormous. Someone chose story instead. The last time a campaign pulled that off was Nike's Write the Future in 2010. Nike hasn't answered yet.

👉 Read the full breakdown

TikTok is overwhelming. Instagram is an ego parade. Pinterest is drowning in AI slop. For a while there, it felt like every platform we used to find inspiration had quietly turned into something that made us feel worse instead of better.

So when I stumbled across Cosmos — a visual canvas built specifically for creatives, now used by teams at Nike, Apple and Chanel — I was skeptical. Another bookmarking tool. Another tab to feel guilty about. Except it wasn't. It actually fixed the labyrinth my inspiration library had become.

And when we rolled it out across the team, something unexpected happened: it changed how we think together. Every week now, everyone shares one thing that genuinely stopped them in their tracks. Not because they have to. Because watching what catches the eye of the person sitting next to you is one of the fastest ways to understand how they think. Collective taste is a real thing, and it compounds. Here's the workflow that made it stick.

👉 Check it out now