Seventy-eight percent of marketers expect to increase their spend on virtual events as a result of coronavirus, according to this NewsCred survey, while 27% expect to spend less on digital ads. My take: the focus is on telling stories, not pushing product. A whopping 87% said their entire marketing staff is working remotely.

Back to surveys. TEKsystems found that making improving customer experience is the top goal for digital transformation programs (72%), making information accessible across the organization is the most important action for success (61%), and integration of technology, systems and platforms is the most common benefit (46%). They don’t mention Customer Data Platforms but these are all CDP memes.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.