2000: "The new company will provide an important new broadband distribution platform for America Online's interactive services and drive subscriber growth through cross-marketing with Time Warner's pre-eminent brands".
The company has tried to portray itself as the pre-eminent brand in the $100 billion security business.
Bill Polian, an N.F.L. executive with a long record of success in Buffalo, Carolina and Indianapolis, praised Jones as the pre-eminent brand builder in sports — "Steinbrenner is the only other one in the conversation," he said.
Ohlmeyer's advantage is that he has the N.F.L., notoriously conservative and fiercely protective of its game but also far and away the pre-eminent brand in sports, and as tough and ruthless a competitor as Microsoft.
These three have created pre-eminent Internet brands, defined the markets they inhabit and proved themselves able to evolve at a blistering pace.
"It's a whole different moment now where design is for everyone," said James Nauyok, the vice president for marketing and visual display of Baker, one of the country's pre-eminent furniture brands.
Mr. Iger called ESPN "quite well positioned to remain the pre-eminent sports brand," noting that it holds long-term contracts with the National Football League and two pre-eminent college sports conferences, the SEC and Pac-12, among others.
Europe is still the pre-eminent maker; its brands account for 70% of the world's luxury consumption.
Zaha Hadid has stoked an international row over her design for Tokyo's 2020 Olympic and Paralympic stadium by branding eminent Japanese architects who criticised her scheme as hypocrites.
When Kleinwort Benson, the eminent British private banking brand with a 200-year history, came up for sale last year, RHJI, a spinoff of the American private equity house Ripplewood, swooped in.
"For the last couple of years, it seems we have been fighting this perception that television is dead," Mr. Nesvig said, "but just recently, it's been forecast that advertisers are going to be investing more in television" as they rediscover its "pre-eminent role in brand-building".
