By Kerel Cooper, CMO at MarketCast
The Oscars are not just Hollywood’s biggest night. For marketers paying attention, they are one of the most instructive advertising environments of the year. A captive, emotionally engaged audience. A broadcast built around cultural moments. And brands with one shot to make it count.
At MarketCast, we measure advertising effectiveness and audience attention across every major cultural moment.
The Oscars audience is primed and paying attention
The scale of engagement around this year’s ceremony underlines why the Oscars matter as an advertising platform. Search volume for Best Picture winner One Battle After Another exploded to 1.05 million on Oscars night, a 6.7x increase over its pre-ceremony average. Even without taking home Best Picture, Sinners had a moment of its own on Oscar night driving 1.05M searches, essentially matching the winner, and taking home multiple awards in the process. It’s a great reminder that the Oscars halo effect goes well beyond who actually takes home the top prize. The Oscars are generating broader cultural engagement across a wider range of films than ever before, which means a larger, more diverse audience sitting in front of that broadcast.
Social conversation reinforced this. The 98th ceremony generated 5.6 million X mentions in 12 hours, and while volume declined from 2025, sentiment improved, with positive sentiment up 4 percentage points year on year. This is an audience that is present, engaged, and vocal. That combination creates real amplification potential for brands that get it right.
The brands that won did not leave it to chance
The 98th Oscars data reveals clear patterns in what drove brand performance during the broadcast. Across MarketCast’s Brand Effect measurement, clear leaders emerged on every key metric.
Burger King topped ad memorability with a score of 0.62, with a self-aware 90-second spot narrated by company president Tom Curtis that openly acknowledged years of falling short and handed the crown to the customer. L’Oreal Beauty Products led message linkage at 0.95, tying its Oscars spot to the upcoming Devil Wears Prada 2, with a cinematic ad featuring Kendall Jenner and Simone Ashley that made the brand message impossible to miss. L’Oreal and Panera Bread also shared the top spot on brand linkage at 0.74 and 0.77 respectively, with Panera’s quietly cinematic spot depicting a young woman bringing her screenplay to life in one of the brand’s cafes. State Farm and Volkswagen achieved the highest likeability scores of the broadcast at 4.5.
These results are consistent with what we saw at the 97th Oscars, where Emirates Airlines led memorability at 0.60, Kiehl’s topped brand linkage at 0.82, Hulu achieved near-perfect message linkage at 0.997, and L’Oreal’s Infallible Setting Mist led likeability at 4.17. The benchmarks shift slightly year on year, but the underlying patterns do not.
What separates the winners
Memorability is earned through simplicity. The ads that scored highest had a single sharp idea executed with confidence. The Oscars audience is emotionally primed, but that does not mean they will remember a cluttered message. Clarity breaks through.
Brand linkage requires deliberate craft. It is surprisingly easy for an ad to be enjoyed without being attributed, particularly in a high-production environment where everything looks polished. The brands that scored highest on linkage made their identity unmistakable, through visual consistency, distinctive assets, or simply landing the brand name at the right moment.
Message clarity is the connective tissue between creative quality and business outcome. A viewer who cannot recall what an ad was selling cannot act on it. The brands that led on message linkage committed to one clear idea and saw it through.
Likeability is not a soft metric. It is a leading indicator of brand trust and long-term purchase intent. At a moment when audiences are choosing to be present, an ad that earns genuine warmth is doing something most advertising never achieves.
The lesson for marketers
The Oscars do not require a special playbook. What they do is make visible what is true of great advertising everywhere. Clarity beats complexity. Brand identity beats production spectacle. Emotional resonance, earned honestly, remains the most reliable driver of the metrics that matter.
The brands that performed best on Oscar night were not the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones that understood their audience and showed up with intention. In an environment this engaged, that is the difference between an ad people remember and one they forget before the next presenter takes the stage.
