Both sides in this debate, those in favor of "traditional" ads and those in favor or digital ad have a point but I think where things are going lies somewhere in the middle which will end up irking the zealots on either side.

The big egos of traditional advertising will be upset because not everyone on earth will have seen their latest "big idea." This is due in no small part to overall media fragmentation which digital (or the internet) but also cable have played big parts. When that Coke ad aired in 1971 how many channels were there? Maybe 6? Of course a large portion of the population was going to see your ad.

And on the digital side they'll have to accept that measurement isn't the be-all-end-all. Between crazy amounts of fraudulent data and the simple fact that creativity and "brand awareness" are really, really tough to quantify they'll have to concede that sometimes the traditional thinking around creative work and "big ideas" will need to win out over analytics.

Source: worked for several years in advertising on the creative side and then on the tech side (and part of the problem is that those two departments are, well, departments but that's a story for another time...)