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.

The integrated cloud communications market is relevant here because it increasingly overlaps with marketing systems. So you should probably care at least a little that cloud-based communications platform 8×8 has agreed to pay $250 million for Fuze, which offers roughly similar products.