Everybody and her grandmother were weighing in on their favorite Super Bowl commercials last night and the buzz continues this morning, including across the pond where the story sits atop London Town's Brand Republicsite. Speaking of grandfolks, octogenarians Betty White and Abe Vigoda scored big by many appraisals, with their spot for Snickers winning the USA Today Ad Bowl. In a commercial targeted to young men, both oldsters took a beating in a pick-up football game. Fans evidently were not offended by the granny-bashing. "It wasn't vicious. It was funny," says one female Ad …

Tiger Woods still holds the top spot among athletes with a brand value of $82 million. The Yanks are the most valuable team brand in North America, worth $266 million. And with a value of $10.7 billion, the Nike brand is the most valuable among sports businesses.

Roben Farzad takes a long look at how AT&T may have blown a golden opportunity as the exclusive network provider for Apple's iPhone in the U.S. by underestimating the device's appeal and under-delivering on network capacity. Marketing disaster that it may be, however, the company announced last week that its fourth-quarter profit had risen 26% from 2008 and that it had added 7.3 million wireless customers last year, equaling its best-ever year. In fact, Farzad writes, AT&T is "in some respects a remarkable turnaround story" with nearly 300,000 employees and annual sales of $124 billion. It is attempting a …

Diego Rodriguez, a self-described gearhead who works at IDEO and teaches at Stanford's d.school, observes the phenomenon of the masculine lust for fast and shiny automobiles and trots out a description of "lekking," which is at the root of the drive for conspicuous consumption as postulated by Thorstein Veblen in 1899. "A lek is an arena where animals engage in sexual signaling in order to attract mates ...," Rodriquez writes. "Automotive designers get this instinctively." But it turns out there may be more to it than that. According to new research by Gad Saad and John Vongas …

Linda Tischlert writes that the 20th annual "Product of the Year" awards in New York Wednesday night were not quite as dazzling as the Grammys earlier in the week but it had its moments. Take Colgate's tiny "Wisp" toothbrush, which has a bead of embedded toothpaste. "Perfect for going from the office to an evening event!" Tischlert writes. "Ideal for red-eye flights where you have to brush your teeth on a plane! Super cute!" You had to be there, perhaps. "When times get tough, it's all about innovation," "Supermarket Guru" and host Phil Lempert told the crowd …

Bloomberg Multimedia lead analyst Richard Yamarone and lead designer David Yanofsky have put together a cogent, highly readable and compellingly interactive charticle that unfortunately carries a the chilling conclusion: Based on historical data, it's not likely that the economy will recover sufficiently this year to avoid the demise of a raft of retail outlets. If you assume "average" assumptions for the GDP (+1%), unemployment (+0.4), real spending (+1%) and net worth (+1%), the data suggest that the U.S. will have a 9.68% "excess" retail capacity by the end of 2010. But you can easily adjust any one, or all, …

As Anheuser-Busch quickly rediscovered when it hinted that its Clydesdales might stay in the stable this Super Bowl, pigskin fans are just as enamored of bow-wows, ribets and lizard-speak -- we're talkin' Louie and Frankie here, dem with da Noo Yawk accent -- as they are of grunting linemen and trash-talking safeties. Peter Hartlaub has compiled an annotated collection of the Top 10 "most memorable" pitchcreatures from the last 43 years of the Super Bowl, accompanied by videos of a key spot for each campaign. What's to annotate? Why, each commercial's "historical impact," of course. The …