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.

Bombora has launched Visitor Insights, a consent-based website tag that tracks the topics a device has consumed.   It infers intent, job function, management level, and other information that B2B publishers can use for ad targeting and personalization.  This Bombora report shows intent trends by industry: for example, media and advertising users show 70% more interest in Customer Data Platforms than they did last year.