>In your traditional bricks n' mortar company, it used to be that the marketing manager could just hand over big chunks of budget to an agency and watch them splash it

This is the story that online marketing gurus love to tell but it's not the case at all. It fits their narrative or they just don't know how it is measured. The reality is that digital has a lot of data but it's not actionable at all. People in digital like to think it is, but it just cannot compare to downstream POS data, for example. And for a LARGE portion of the business models, digital just could not provide the marketing-measurement feed back loop for a long time. It is just now starting to come of age and has a lot of catching up to do.

And there are plenty of lunches in digital too.