the new yorker on the diminishing value of a brand.

In this article the New Yorker makes a weak case that the value/importance of a company's brand has weakened in the modern day. It's not true. A brand is just as powerful, if not more powerful than it has ever been - there's just more parts of a brand that can be evaluated.

Old school thinking still evaluates a brand's worth based on it's mass/above the line communications.  A brand is, and always has been, the sum of all parts of a company - its products, philosophy, employees, identity etc. A brand is always on and always communicating. Companies that (and have always) embrace that see the 'proliferation of data' as a positive, not a threat to the brand.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2014/02/17/140217ta_talk_surowiecki

low retention with SB ads. unless you're the best.

while this article doesn't explicitly state it, there's evidence here on the importance of PR and the need to surround your broadcast with multichannel efforts to actually break through the clutter.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-03/hey-super-bowl-sponsors-your-ads-are-already-forgotten