Digital is no longer just a piece of the pie. It is the pie pan that holds all ingredients in and cooks them into a flavorful treat. It is the glue, the sticky bits in between everything else. In other words, it has become the infrastructure that marketing is built upon.

We used to put video on TV, sound on radio and words into print. We had three distinct platforms each with its own problems and pluses. Now, we put everything through the digital blender and create streaming videos for our eyes, podcasts for our ears, and words, words are everywhere from blogs to motion graphics to memes to social. This is the content pie our brains devour at an astonishing rate. More than 500 million hours of video are watched on YouTube per day. That’s about 20,833,333 hours of video per hour. Seventy-five percent of Facebook users and fifty percent of Instagram users are on those sites daily, either creating content, digesting it or both. Email is the third-most influential source of B2B info. Businesses that blogged sixteen or more times per month had nearly three and one-half times the traffic as companies that only blogged four or fewer times per month.

This isn’t digital marketing, this is marketing.

P&G made headlines recently when they said they’d deeply cut their digital marketing spend. But that isn’t necessarily true, what they are doing is asking for more transparency regarding the money they spend. When you are the world’s biggest spender of ad dollars, other companies listen to what you are asking. I would argue, the exact reason they’re demanding this transparency is that the digital infrastructure allows for it. You can’t track how many people might have read an ad in a magazine the way you can track how many times a video was watched and how long someone watched it. Increasingly, we are using these metrics to justify spends, jobs and determine success. This is the metal used to make the digital pie pan. This accountability has shaped the pie and allowed digital to become a container of marketing rather than just another channel.