Facebook dominates the headlines among Kantar’s most valuable brands in 2022

June 21, 2022

Written by Haley Corzo

This month Kantar released their annual BrandZ Global Report that ranks, analyzes, and honors the world’s most valuable brands. This is done through Kantar’s financial model that calculates brand value (the $ amount that the brand contributes to the overall business value of the parent company). And we thought it would be interesting to put our own NewsWhip spin on it.

Kantar’s report measures how meaningful, how different, and how salient brands are to consumers, and from that they have revealed a list of the top 10 most valuable global brands in 2022. We have taken their findings and created our own rankings of the top brands, instead measuring their impact based on the level of public interest they generate across the web and social media. 

Below are the most popular brands, ranked by engagements to articles about them.

chart of the public interest to the most valuable brands

According to Kantar’s report, Apple has reclaimed the top spot in terms of value, but when it comes to public interest online, Apple falls third on the list. Facebook is the clear leader among these brands, generating 42 million engagements. Let’s look at what narratives drove the high engagement for the platform. 

Facebook

Since the start of the year there have been over 290k articles published about Facebook, and while the social media platform often finds itself to be a topic in political conversations, the articles with the most engagements were more about stories that surfaced on Facebook and really resonated with the public. The top article was about a siberian husky that was reunited with its owner thanks to a Ukrainian serviceman who posted an appeal on Facebook. The story from The Daily Mail received over 268k engagements and served as a joyful story to emerge during the Ukraine war. 

Other stories within the top 10 about Facebook include the death of singer Meat Loaf (228k), which was announced on his Facebook page, and a seven year old girl who went viral on the platform for singing a song from Frozen in Kyiv (212k). It was later revealed that she safely made the journey to Poland. 

Amazon

Amazon was the second most popular brand in the top 10, even with less than half as many engagements as Facebook. However, media coverage of the company was significantly higher than Facebook, with over 407k articles being written about it. 

One clear narrative stood out among the top stories about Amazon, and that was due to thousands of employees at a Staten Island warehouse voting to form a union, marking the first successful union win for the company in the US. The top article about Amazon overall was a feature story on Chris Smalls, the employee who led the Staten Island push. The article from NPR received over 289k engagements. 

Apple

As mentioned before, Apple took the top spot as Kantar’s most valuable brand this year, but the brand was third on our list in terms of engagement, just shy of catching Amazon with its 19k engagements. Product updates and new features tend to frequent headlines when it comes to Apple, and the most engaged article about the brand was the announcement of a pregnant person and a pregnant man emoji coming to the latest iOS update (188k).

Apple was also pulled into conversations surrounding the war in Ukraine after stopping all sales of products in Russia due to the invasion. This was responsible for the second biggest article, with NBC News receiving over 169k engagements to its story.

Other takeaways

Louis Vuitton, the one luxury fashion company to feature on Kantar’s most valuable brand list, came in eighth place in our public interest rankings, but was still able to earn over 1 million engagements, largely due to a BTS member being an ambassador for the brand.

Alibaba and Tencent were the only two brands who did not surpass 1 million engagements to articles written about them. However, the two Chinese brands are likely to have more reach if we were to add other languages, but for the sake of this data representation, it was filtered to English language only. 

While the rankings of these 10 brands might look different from the order of Kantar’s most valuable, it is still clear that these brands hold a strong influence on consumers, when it comes to business, and when it comes to public interest online. 

For more on how brands can be measured by their public interest, read our blog on TIME”s most influential artists of the year here.

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Haley Corzo

Haley is a Content Strategist for NewsWhip working at the intersection of journalism and marketing. With experience working in advertising for consumer brands, she brings a fresh perspective on how NewsWhip’s technology can be used to make an impact. She is passionate about topics such as mental health, women’s issues, and travel.

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