AdAge Brandz Ranking

AdAge released its annual BrandZ ranking and atop once again is Google. Shocker. Google is like an oil tycoon, except it doesn’t gouge us with exorbitant search prices and then report record earnings. Not that I don’t love Google because it is all things to all people. It’s every bit as important to me as gas is to my car.
Apple is ranked 7th, but the real kicker is that their brand value changed 123% since the 2007 survey – in just one year. As an Apple devotee, I can imagine that this is attributable to myriad developments. But, realistically, it’s probably all about the iPhone, right?
BlackBerry’s brand value also grew by a whopping 390%. I wonder if this had more to do with the iPhone’s popularity contributing to the overall appeal for smart phones or the Pearl with its anti-gadget sensibility or the emergence of BlackBerry from the patent infringement stain that has plagued them for a few years now.
One of the most interesting things about this list is that the vast majority of brands on the list still produce tangible products (GE, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, China Mobile, IBM, McDonalds)…but, I bet if we uncovered the methodology behind the rankings, we would see that a strong influence on each brand’s score is a rapidly growing interactive marketing component.