As I was sitting in the departure lounge of the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow, I saw a  swan fly past the window. I remember wondering if the bird had flight clearance. The fleeting glimpse of that beautiful bird will be one of the most distinctive memories that I will take away from my first visit to the new British Airways facility. The rest of the experience has already faded into a blurred memory of steel, glass and chrome.

Among the most popular applications on Facebook today are those that allow people to identify themselves in terms of their taste in movies or books, or their similarity to a Harry Potter character or a Disney princess. These applications provide a creative and fun way of sharing information and creating a sense of connection.

According to one of the Disney applications, I’m Mulan. I guess if you have seen the Disney movie, you now know something about me. And that, I think, is the attraction of social networks. They allow us to create communities that stretch across geographies and time zones. It does not matter whether a friend is in New York, New Zealand, China, Italy or Mexico; the News Feed provides a way of staying in touch.

Yesterday I spent an hour with Hayes Roth, CMO at Landor Associates, answering questions mailed in to the Financial Time’s "Ask the Expert" forum following the announcement of the 2008 BrandZ™ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands Ranking. There were some very interesting questions and I hope our answers did them justice. (Click here for the transcript.)

Perhaps what we should have done was to focus on the issue raised by Mark Ritson in Marketing magazine. After reviewing the fortunes of various brands in the Top 100, Ritson made the following comment:

The answer is that they all recorded substantial increases in brand value between 2007 and 2008 as measured by Millward Brown Optimor’s 2008 BrandZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands Ranking.

Given that technology brands, including mobile providers, accounted for more than half the increase in the Top 100 valuation from 2007 to 2008 and have attracted a lot of the media’s attention, it is nice to see some "traditional" brands not only surviving but thriving. In fact, as we shall see, they share more in common than strong brand valuation.

Last month, I wrote about two ads produced by Fallon—the “Gorilla” ad for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and the “Cake” ad for the Skoda Fabia. When I wrote that post, it was clear that the Gorilla ad was quite the sensation, attracting the attention of agency planners and YouTube viewers. Since then, Fallon was named Agency of the Year at the 32nd British Television Advertising Awards, Gorilla was named as the Best TV Commercial of the year, and Cake won a Gold award.