Hey, anyone want to take a wild guess as to which company just won BrandChannel.com's "Brand of the Year" survey? Bear in mind that this is a largely Apple-themed soap opera you're watching, and we'd need a reason to bring up the topic in the first place. If you need a bigger hint, note that there's a giant green Apple logo dominating the site's home page. Still no idea? Book an appointment with a good neurologist and then allow us to point out that the article describing the outcome is titled "Apple Shines: 2001 Brand of the Year Results." And if you still haven't clued in, well, we're just going to have to declare you legally dead and move on.

Yes, as faithful viewer Shannon informs us, Apple was indeed the official "brand of the year," capturing 14% of the global vote and securing its spot as the one brand that "had the most impact on our lives in 2001." Well, we certainly can't argue with that from a personal perspective, but given the reasonably likely scenario that most people on this planet probably don't spend the majority of their waking hours scribbling down plot twists for an online drama set in the turbulent world of the Macintosh platform, we actually find that result perhaps a little surprising. After all, Apple beat out such heavy-hitting brands as Nokia, Volkswagen, and Starbucks, while Coca-Cola and Nike didn't even make the top five.

Of course, when you look at how these results were determined, perhaps it makes a little more sense. The brands were ranked by-- surprise!-- the readers of BrandChannel.com themselves, and since the site bills itself as "the world's only online exchange about branding," it presumably has a, shall we say, specific audience. Not to put too fine a point on it, BrandChannel.com's demographic is probably comprised heavily of Nokia-chatting, Starbucks-sipping, Absolut-quaffing, Google-searching, Volkswagen-driving Mac users with strong enough ties to the Mac-heavy world of advertising to be frequenting a web site about branding. That doesn't change the fact that Apple's "consistent attention to innovation" deserves this kind of recognition, but it may shed a little light on why, in a world in which fewer than one out of twenty desktop computers is a Mac, the results came out the way they did. But heck, we're sure not going to argue with them.