How badly have marketers been hit by the pandemic? More than half – 55% — reported a budget cut, according to this Chief Marketer study. The marketing mix is also changing, with growth in social media, content marketing, influencer marketing, and email. Losers include search marketing, referrals, and, of course, live events.

The other side of customer tracking by advertisers is identity management by customers. Blockchain platform Dragonchain has just spun off a new company called MyFii to develop its decentralized identity solution, which splits customer information into pieces that can be stored separately. Companies can then verify identities based on the fragments, thus avoiding the risk of storing personal identifiers. Clever.

GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads.  The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles.  GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.