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Every company is now in the entertainment industry
Half of all ads are less engaging than watching a cow eat grass. That's not a metaphor. It was actually measured in a controlled study. The most common emotion advertising now elicits is neutrality. Literally no feeling whatsoever.
Meanwhile, 80% of people who open TikTok are there to be entertained. So are 65% on Instagram and 55% on Facebook. When brands appear in those feeds they aren't competing for attention against their category rivals, they're competing against the most entertaining content on the internet.
And most brands are losing. Badly.
Everything got boring
Sometime in the early 2000s, advertising started trading creativity for conversions. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see the impact that’s had on long term brand performance. But at the time, it all happened because of individually sensible decisions. The boom of digital advertising formats enabled and incentivised sharper targeting, shorter formats, clearer calls to action, and metrics that rewarded clicks over memory.
When you can measure direct ROI, the pressure to optimise for it becomes hard to resist. Entertaining people with fun creative costs more and the conversion is harder to track, so budgets kept flowing toward the more measurable option.
System1 data shows that showmanship features in advertising have declined steadily since the early 2000s, while salesmanship features have risen. What was once a relatively even split has become a lopsided chart, with rational, functional advertising dominating a medium that used to run on emotion.
The response from most brands has been to accept the new normal and optimise within it, with better creative testing, and more precise segmentation. It’s all useful in isolation, but none of it addresses the fact that the advertising itself is no longer worth paying attention to.
The impact of this trade-off has been so significant because culture went the other direction. Creators built large and loyal audiences by focusing on something specific and talking about it with genuine enthusiasm. The bar for what counts as entertaining kept rising because the competition to earn people's attention kept getting more intense. What would’ve qualified as a decently creative ad in 2003 now registers as little more than background noise.
The gap opened slowly, but it’s become embarrassing.
Your real competition isn't your category
When most businesses teams think about competition, they default to the other brands in their category. Who else sells what they sell.
But think about it from the customer’s perspective. When someone opens TikTok, they're not mentally benchmarking your content against your direct competitors. It’s all sitting in an infinite feed alongside a creator who spent two years building a following around a very specific type of Japanese convenience store snack, historical reenactments made by a 22-year-old with a serious attention to detail, and whatever MrBeast spent $4 million making this week.
That's the real competition in the attention economy.
Rolling Stone’s top 25 most influential content creators
Entertaining brands have 2x the consumer preference of boring ones. People might not consciously choose the entertaining brand at the checkout, but attention and emotion are the mechanisms through which preference forms. You can't be remembered without first being noticed, and you can't be noticed without first being worth noticing.
The impact of entertainment on broader brand metrics are consistently significant. Entertaining short-form content generates 2x the brand awareness lift and 2.8x the brand image lift compared to the least entertaining content. Sentiment and attention build brand better than almost anything.
The brands that accepted the new job description
Tracksuit's new Entertain or Die report scored 16,200 US consumers on how effectively brands create and sustain entertainment value across connection, creativity, distinctiveness, and relatability. Media companies were excluded, and what remained is a ranking of brands competing for attention without the structural advantage of being an entertainment platform. This is the Entertainment Index.
The top 30 was less of a list of trendy challenger brands than I thought it would be. It’s more like a proof of concept. Some are pantry staples that have been around for decades (or even centuries), others are challengers, but none of them are obvious entertainment companies. What they share is that they've built entertainment into their fundamental brand DNA, not just into some occasional campaigns.
83% of the top 30 grew revenue, and nearly half achieved double-digit growth.
This is the third annual instalment of the index, and the movement of brands over time is as telling as the rankings themselves.
LEGO climbed 54 places. It hasn’t a single major campaign or viral moment they’ve had recently, but they’ve grown through sustained creative investment. They’re expanding a digital universe built with Epic Games, there’s cross-media storytelling across games and streaming, and content reaches an audience much wider than the one they started with. They’ve built an identity that is genuinely entertaining to people who weren't already LEGO fans.
On the flip side, Duolingo dropped 19 places. This is a brand that was widely celebrated for its unhinged social presence just a couple of years ago. Leadership changes and an AI-first strategy shift created inconsistency in their brand identity and the entertainment posture faded.
The index moves because entertainment is an ongoing commitment, not a one-off campaign.
The question is whether you've noticed
There's a version of this insight that gets misconstrued as a content brief and ends up with a lot of internal conversations about whether you should start a podcast. That's not quite what the data is getting at.
The shift that needs to happen is accepting that your audience's expectations have been reset by the most entertaining content on the internet, and that you now compete with that for the same attention, in the same feeds, without a category qualifier protecting you. The person scrolling past your ad didn't land there wanting to see brand content from your industry. They came to be entertained.
For some brands, that means their own serialised content formats. For others, it's an expanded relationship with creators. Wimbledon made content for design fans and foodies during the 2025 tournament, not just tennis followers. Heinz built an entire social identity around the distinctive ways people use the product. Hot Topic created an original TikTok series. These brands aren't doing entertainment as a stunt. They've internalised the environment they're operating in.
The brands at the top of the Entertainment Index think in formats more than executions, and build for audiences rather than segments. That requires a completely different operating model than the one most marketing teams were trained on. Consumers have already decided the new model is entertainment-led. How quickly other marketers catch up is still the question.
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