If you have been paying attention to what Google does, you would know that since 2003 they have made several acquisitions of companies that were leading edge in the area of semantics. They have long been hungry to find ways that the algorithm can not just understand the meaning of specific words, but can truly understand language and the implied meanings behind words and phrases.
Based on that, about 5-6 years ago I started using a lot of partial anchor text links or exact anchors that were surrounded by other words. I wanted to give Google as much information as I could about what a page was about.
Since then, I have ranked pages without ever building a single exact match anchor to them and instead use a lot of natural language that is keyword heavy or LSI heavy. That doesn't mean you cannot build exact match, but doing it this way has helped pages to rank for tons of keywords that I never would have thought of. Of course, that was easier to see before Google went with their private search BS and started hiding keyword data from us in Analytics.
On a side note to that, if anyone tells you that you need to build a certain percentage of naked URL links or brand anchor links, just ignore them. There are plenty of sites ranking just fine without doing any of that nonsense. Besides, chances are that scrapers will throw naked URL and brand links at you whether you want them or not.
