True Superbrands

This is a true story.

The Offical Top 500 Superbrands for 2009/10 (2010?) will be published in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend. Here are the top 10:

Microsoft

Rolex

Google

British Airways

BBC

Mercedes

Coca Cola

Lego

Apple

Encyclopaedia Britannica

You read it correctly. Storming in at number 10 is a resurgent Encyclopaedia Britannica. Forget those Wikipedia cowboys and their open-sourced oddball, this is the real thing. There is such a buzz on the street about good old EB. Sure, no-one actually buys it and its only got around 400k people visiting it online each month, compared to the 15 million who use Wikipedia, but it’s been around since the 18^th century and that counts for a lot when it comes to knowing stuff.

And isn’t it nice to see Microsoft at number one. Bill Gates is loved and cherished the world over for giving us the Internet and other things like that. And in those slacks he looks just like an ordinary guy!

This splendid survey also puts those foolish internet startups (upstarts more like!) in their place. Granted those Google folk got third place but The Facebook was ranked 248^th !, behind Alka-Seltzer and Tampax – real brands that you can actually buy in a shop. 300 million people can be wrong! And Amazon only got 155^th place, they should try building some proper bookstores.

The doomed internet TV website YouTube also gets put in its rightful place, at 169. It’ll never catch on. The venue for legitimate entertainment is the Royal Albert Hall, at number 36 (just behind John Lewis, another personal favourite).

Well done Superbrands for standing up for the brands that we really care about.