Ryan, please contact Matt after class. This whole discussion is, not unexpectedly, confused. Mainly because the people discussing 'branding' don't really understand what branding is. Branding is not advertising. Branding is the embodiment of attributes and benefits which are associated with a specific entity.
Advertising is the function of raising that brand's awareness.
Now that we have that settled, you can see how ridiculous it is to expect a text link to have any impact at all on a brand, especially when the line of text communicates nothing about a brand. But none of the companies mentioned here have any idea how to do it, which is why their brands are as weak as they are. But let's assume that a line of text or a button really could influence someone to click or not to click on a banner. There's too much inbreeding going on here. Fewer, I suspect, than are downloading amateur college porn MPEG's from your local newsgroup.