According to a Booz Allen-Wolff Olin study based on interviews with Europe’s Top 500 companies, 90% of these successful concerns are convinced that brand orientation is a key factor in their success. Ninety percent? I wonder if NA companies are that brand savvy.

Interesting factoid: Unlike NA, Senior management, not marketing departments, guide brand management in Europe’s most successful companies. Would that work in NA? Or is it already happening?

Developing branded content online is so 2004, so hopelessly Web 1.0. Today’s successful brands are built on social networking. And if you’re trying to reach the younger crowd, there is no hotter place to network than at MySpace.com. Tap into its 74 million (!) subscribers and your brand can go from obscurity to stardom in no time. Brands and fictional characters are allowed to have “personal” profiles and friends lists on MySpace. Case in point, a viral campaign for plastic surgery television drama “Nip/Tuck” created a MySpace profile for one of the primary characters, The Carver, and an in less than two weeks, 60,000 MySpace members had linked to Carver’s profile.

And this week, Walt Disney Pictures announced a new innovative approach to leverage the MySpace community. Pirates of the Caribbean II trailers have been granted to a randomly selected MySpace member from more than 57,000 participants that have joined the movie’s official MySpace profile. The trailer will be given to the winning MySpace member in the form of a tag allowing the user to view and share through e-mail, instant messaging, bulletins and blogs. Additional prizes will be awarded to every 10,000th member to join the film’s community as well as the member that distributes the trailer to the most people. It will be another interesting experiment to follow on how to unleash the viral branding bug.