Volkswagen, T-Mobile, Pepsi and Westfield Stratford City are among the 20 brands whose content was the most shared across the internet this year.
Volkswagen: mini Darth Vader is most shared ad of 2011
Unruly Media's annual list is led by Deutsch USA's 'The Force' ad for Volkswagen, featuring a mini Darth Vader, which has racked up a massive 4.8 million shares across social networks since it hit the web.
The ad was seeded online before being shown during the Super Bowl in the US, and was also shown on UK television.
It has been shared in over 4.5 million Facebook updates, 170,000 tweets and just under 3,000 blog posts. It has been viewed more than 46 million times.
Sarah Wood, the founder of Unruly Media, said sharing content was now much more popular than last year: "There was a 20% increase in the number of views the top 20 attracted, to 240 million, but a fivefold increase in the number of shares they attracted to 25 million."
The highest-placed film from the UK was Saatchi & Saatchi's 'The T-Mobile Royal Wedding' with 1.74 million shares in fourth place – narrowly beaten by Saatchis' Italian office with another effort for T-Mobile, 'Angry Birds Live'.
The longest piece of content, at a whopping nine minutes, was the second-placed DC Shoes in-house creation, 'Hollywood Megamercial'.
The chart ranked ads according to the number of times they have been shared on Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere.
